Pillars of Eternity II - Flopped

I've stated my faith in obsidian after MS gets ahold of it. MS may end up being the devil like what they did with Shadowrun but they've have been willing to set things free once they had their fill of them.

I've been talking like this is unusual - and it is unusual for media companies (CBS/Viacom being the major exception) - but its not for companies in general. The Motorola buyout for instance as well as MS buyout of Nokia. Acquiring assets and keeping what you want, then selling a name is pretty common. In this case, the developers would still be around.

joxer said:

Good. They need to kill Unity already and license whatever other engine. Unity just can't do what Obsidian wants to.

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What is it exactly they want to do that Unity prevents?

Ripper said:

What is it exactly they want to do that Unity prevents?

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Just ignore it.
Due to its free-form nature, Unity is very easy to abuse, resulting in unstable, under-performing code.
Hence it is Unity's fault if the game is running slow or crashes frequently...
... or maybe the game's programmer's? Oh no, that must not be true!!!!!

/sarcasm

ChaosTheory said:

Wow, I had no idea so many people here didn't like the sequel… I played it right after I played Divinity OS2, and although the styles are different, I consider them equals overall. I cannot imagine getting much better from a producer in today's day and age.

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I read it as a vocal few. The game itself has had generally favorable reviews. I'm expecting over the long term it will do well.

duerer said:

Just ignore it.
Due to its free-form nature, Unity is very easy to abuse, resulting in unstable, under-performing code.
Hence it is Unity's fault if the game is running slow or crashes frequently…
… or maybe the game's programmer's? Oh no, that must not be true!!!!!

/sarcasm

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Recently we had BT4 released and that one used Unreal 4.. it had serious issues of all kinds, including performance issues.

It is about time people understood that people using tools> tools being used.

I have not played it (POE2), speaking for my previous comment and post. I was just relaying some things about it that made me not so anxious to get it, and why I thought the setting was not very good to attract a big audience. It might be a good game, but I agree with some others that will only buy it on a deep discount with all DLC included for a cheap price.

duerer said:

Just ignore it.
Due to its free-form nature, Unity is very easy to abuse, resulting in unstable, under-performing code.
Hence it is Unity's fault if the game is running slow or crashes frequently…
… or maybe the game's programmer's? Oh no, that must not be true!!!!!

/sarcasm

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Yeah, I've talked about this before. If we were looking at an FPS game, and performance was a problem, I can see the argument that other engines have better renderers, and so on. But these kind of "Unity engine gives you cooties" beliefs that float around are rather like Chinese whispers.

Ripper said:

Yeah, I've talked about this before. If we were looking at an FPS game, and performance was a problem, I can see the argument that other engines have better renderers, and so on. But these kind of "Unity engine gives you cooties" beliefs that float around are rather like Chinese whispers.

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Yeah we talked about this on multiple times. Unity, bad coders, budgets & deadlines.

rjshae said:

I read it as a vocal few. The game itself has had generally favorable reviews. I'm expecting over the long term it will do well.

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See that attitude is not how the industry works. Most sales for a game usually come from the first week on Steam. Also slow sales don't feed your workers and pay the bills.

Now if you invested on FIG you were probably scammed as shown a $1,000 investing share barely got you $200 back. So it's good for Obsidian and bad for investors.

Not good news but I guess Obsidian is glad all the money went to them.

Couchpotato said:

Yeah we talked about this on multiple times. Unity, bad coders, budgets & deadlines.

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Exactly. Unity's problem is that it makes it easy to make a good prototype. Then, due to deadlines, it gets very tempting to leave it at that and just polish it a bit instead of properly optimizing your code. What I'm trying to say, it not Unity's problem at all.

Ripper said:

What is it exactly they want to do that Unity prevents?

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Fallout "clone".

Ivanwah said:

Exactly. Unity's problem is that it makes it easy to make a good prototype. Then, due to deadlines, it gets very tempting to leave it at that and just polish it a bit instead of properly optimizing your code. What I'm trying to say, it not Unity's problem at all.

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But it is. Unity doesn't care about code optimization on PC nor about modern hardware. Nor about modern technologies exclusive to PC. It cares only about porting2phone. It's pisspoor PC code feels like copypasted ME elevator loading screen subroutine and ME is 10 years old. It wouldn't surprise me if someone found out that Unity does not know PC has inverse squareroot instruction within CPU.

If you still don't believe me, believe Unity games at the market. How many of those games "hacked" the game saving/loading part so it doesn't last a minute on SSD? Assuming it's not amateurs who develop games on PC but professionals of which some are such veterans that with given time could make an engine of their own, what can be the cause Unity's loading times etc can't be tamed? Easy answer. It's such garbage of a code even it's developers don't know where the head and where the tail is.
Additionally, doesn't DoS look suspiciously similar to Unity isometric games? Of course it does, all isometric games should look similar. The difference is within the code. At least on my machine, I don't see DoS loading screen after going out for a coffee and returning back. With Unity games, I can wash the dishes, clean the house, dig a new well and it would still load a saved game. On SSD.

joxer said:

If you still don't believe me, believe Unity games at the market. How many of those games "hacked" the game saving/loading part so it doesn't last a minute on SSD? Assuming it's not amateurs who develop games on PC but professionals of which some are such veterans that with given time could make an engine of their own, what can be the cause Unity's loading times etc can't be tamed? Easy answer. It's such garbage of a code even it's developers don't know where the head and where the tail is.

Additionally, doesn't DoS look suspiciously similar to Unity isometric games? Of course it does, all isometric games should look similar. The difference is within the code. At least on my machine, I don't see DoS loading screen after going out for a coffee and returning back. With Unity games, I can wash the dishes, clean the house, dig a new well and it would still load a saved game. On SSD.

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Ah yes I fondly remember the save system slowing down or causing memory leaks. Especially with Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity it was admitted by both developers.

As for load times hell yes I find them annoying. My hatred of them started with Tryanny, and still simmers nowadays with Pathfinder:Kingmaker the load screen simulator.

All an SSD does is slow down the times compared to an old fashioned HD.

Also it's weird how Original Sin 1&2 is an Unity game and the load screens are not as prevalent, or take as long. Wonder why? Will have to ask Larian that question myself.

No reason to ask. Larian uses their inhouse engine.

I've played a lot of Unity games that don't take ages to load, so it's clearly not Unity. And that notion that Unity does not support modern technologies is bs. It's not on the exact same level as Unreal, for example, but it's pretty damn close. It's a free, versatile, multi-platform engine that is easy to pick up and as such is very lucrative for indie and amateur developers. That's why you see a lot of bad looking and performing games and it gives Unity bad rep. I've seen the same amount of bad performing and looking trash made using Unreal, but for some reason, it doesn't get such bad rep.

joxer said:

No reason to ask. Larian uses their inhouse engine.

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Hmm thought it was the Unity Engine just with a few added changes?

Update:Nope googled it called Divinity Engine 3.0

Ivanwah said:

I've played a lot of Unity games that don't take ages to load, so it's clearly not Unity. And that notion that Unity does not support modern technologies is bs. It's not on the exact same level as Unreal, for example, but it's pretty damn close. It's a free, versatile, multi-platform engine that is easy to pick up and as such is very lucrative for indie and amateur developers. That's why you see a lot of bad looking and performing games and it gives Unity bad rep. I've seen the same amount of bad performing and looking trash made using Unreal, but for some reason, it doesn't get such bad rep.

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Well my three PC's beg to differ as most Unity RPGs load very slow. Two of my PCs have old fashioned HD's, and now one has an SSD. Kingmaker is the biggest problem.

Ivanwah said:

I've played a lot of Unity games that don't take ages to load, so it's clearly not Unity. And that notion that Unity does not support modern technologies is bs. It's not on the exact same level as Unreal, for example, but it's pretty damn close. It's a free, versatile, multi-platform engine that is easy to pick up and as such is very lucrative for indie and amateur developers. That's why you see a lot of bad looking and performing games and it gives Unity bad rep. I've seen the same amount of bad performing and looking trash made using Unreal, but for some reason, it doesn't get such bad rep.

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If the belief has been engraved in the Codex Joxica, it is there for the ages

Couchpotato said:

Well my three PC's beg to differ as most Unity RPGs load very slow. Two of my PCs have old fashioned HD's, and now one has an SSD. Kingmaker is the biggest problem.

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I have the same experience with PoE and Kingmaker, not denying that. But I have different experience with other games. That's why I say the problem lays with developers and not with the engine.

Kingmaker is definitely quite slow, even with an SSD. I'm hoping it is one of the issues they clean up in the next few months.

Two bad apples don't make a golden goose. I have played a couple of very fast unity games (the names slip my mind now) and i'm inclined to blame the developers. Btw I don't remember battletech being a dog in performance but been a while since i played it.

Ivanwah said:

I have the same experience with PoE and Kingmaker, not denying that. But I have different experience with other games. That's why I say the problem lays with developers and not with the engine.

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you said:

Two bad apples don't make a golden goose. I have played a couple of very fast unity games (the names slip my mind now) and i'm inclined to blame the developers. Btw I don't remember battletech being a dog in performance but been a while since i played it.

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Battletech unfortunately also has the dreaded long load times, and the famous save bug that causes the fabled memory leak. I haven't played it recently to see it was fixed.

The first thing that I try to find out about a game before purchasing is whether its made with Unity, if so I avoid it at all cost.

This is a personal issue that I have with this engine, maybe because I use relatively old hardware (which seems to meet the minimum stated requirements but nevertheless drives the processor to high temperatures and runs like its at the back of a virtual machine).

Back to topic, as others have said, the market is currently saturated with rpgs and many of these are releasing sequels over short periods of time before people can finish the previous title. It also doesn't help that expansion passes are announced before the game release which makes many people (including myself) to wait for the complete package at a discounted price.