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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - The RPG Files - Beast of Winter DLC - It's So Cool, It's HOT! - MM
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire - The RPG Files - Beast of Winter DLC - It's So Cool, It's HOT! - MMORPG.com
Earlier this week, the highly-acclaimed Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire grew a bit larger with the addition of the Beast of Winter DLC. The new content takes players to the frozen realm of Harbingers' Watch, a small village filled with fanatics dedicated to the god Rymrgand and his portion of the "Beyond".
Comments
thanks god
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Additionally, we have been covering RPGs for the crossover interest for almost a decade now. For someone who's been here since 2004, you should know that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I totally went the "ram and board and fight" approach and didn't mess with that turn-based confusing battle mode.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But, after all the coverage and hate thrown at the GW2 people for firing that crazy lady, who 100% deserved it for being an extreme hate-monger and super nuts, why has this site, and every major game site, ignored the Chris Avallone scandal?
I am not a fan of Planescape Torment nor Mask of the Betrayer, the main things he is loved for. But he is loved by many in the rpg community. The way Obsidian treated him, if his claims on Rpgcodex are true, which they seem to be, the lack of reporting on it doesn't make a lick of sense.
Why is Obsidian getting a pass for blatantly doing wrong to an extremely important employee, when companies like GW2 get reamed for 100% reasonable and justifiable firings?
It seems like the identity politics of these situations are far, far more important than the actual facts and actions involved. Do gaming sites not want to expend their influence on situations where reporting on game companies doing bad things doesn't also further an ideological narrative they can push?
At least make a post about what a dickhead Fergus Whatshisname (Urghard?) is and why. Was anything ever posted about the working conditions for the Witcher devs? I really don't get it. Sweatshops are still considered bad, right?
And I'm not singling out this site. But gaming sites in general. This site less so since Obsidian and the Witcher people are outside the major purview of this site, though the game's of both are still reported on.
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
No. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is the main game. You'd have to purchase that + either the DLC or the Season Pass if you want the paid DLC (like the one in this article). A number of free DLC have been released for the base game too.
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This is the thing where the owner had his wife on the payroll doing jack squat and some such right? Isn't it a privately held company though? All the heat in the world isn't going to do much if they have good games.
Leaving it out completely would've felt odd, though.
No. The tried to leverage his earned benefits which they owed him into a deal silencing him, and other huge dickery. Here is a quote from him posted on rpgcodex.net-
"I didn’t get anything when I left Obsidian. There were no share payouts, no equity, and this was in addition to the other logistical problems around the departure – the sudden cancellation of my health insurance, problems with my 401K, errors in Obsidian’s accounting, and several existing independent contracts they refused to uphold.
Realizing my family issues and the debts therein, however, they did make an attempt to leverage that into a far more confining separation agreement that would remove my right to work on RPGs, and my silence on all issues that could pertain to Obsidian or any other company they were involved with or the CEO had a % in (Fig, Zero Radius, Dark Rock Industries, etc.). This included an inability to critique games I’d worked on – much of my critiques on my own games tend to be blunt, and not being able to speak to them felt unnatural to me.
The company involvement silence worried me more, however, as it meant that if anything illegal happened with any of those companies (these could include serious charges like accounting issues, silence on harassment issues with regards to employees, perjury related to company documents and payments), I couldn’t speak about the issue, even if I felt strongly against what was being revealed.
While all this is good for Obsidian's upper management and is what is sometimes considered "good business," I did feel it showed a lack of ethics.
Still, that attempt at leverage did cause me to re-evaluate aspects of my life. Realizing debt was affecting my decision, I instead focused on working as hard as possible to make up for the amount Obsidian tried to use as leverage to force a signature – and succeeded.
When that happened, I realized I was free of the situation – completely free, for the first time. Feargus and the owners had no hold on my voice, my time, and my creativity any longer. And it was great.
When they made me an offer to contract me to write for Tyranny (which might seem to be an olive branch, but it turned out to be something they needed for contractual reasons with Paradox, but no one had ever communicated it to me), these were the reasons I refused – I didn’t wish to be part of Obsidian’s upper level development process and their pipelines any longer, as these processes were coming from a bad place, and it showed.
Also, realizing there was no restitution for the issues mentioned, I made a promise to myself that nothing I would do would ever cause Feargus and the owners any further financial gain. If my silence was that important to them, then there's no need to be silent because that right hadn't been signed away. Simply put, I like the developers at Obsidian very much, I work and correspond with many of those who are there or have left, and I would work with the developers again. I do feel upper management at Obsidian has serious flaws that need to be addressed, and I stand by that statement."
Since I've been here since 2004 you can see where my confusion came in....back then you actually only covered MMOs.....Additionally back then the site was much more relevant for you know MMOs, as many of your competing website now didn't exist back then. I come visit maybe a couple times a month anymore, during those rare stops I hadn't seen you all cover a non-multiplayer game to this point.
Given the name of your website, I'm sure you can understand my confusion. But maybe not, maybe I'm the crazy one
I'm hoping they either do work to flesh these kinds of systems out better or alter them to be a little more organic in that you can participate while exploring the game itself, instead of taking time out of the rest of the game to do these activities.
It does not have turned-base combat like Divinity OS 2. It has real time with pause and the ability to turn down combat speed. Quite different, in my eyes at least.
I really wanted to keep this site MMORPG specific but eventually we all realized that it would never survive if we did not expand into cRPGs as well as MMOFPS games, etc. We need to publish content many times daily and as the MMO space started drying up we didn't have a lot of choice.
That being said we still focus mainly on MMORPG's as much as we can. We know that most of our readers play more than just MMO's and also play RPGs in general and I feel our content is still relevant to the MMO gamer. We shifted from a MMORPG to MMO + RPG philosophy.
I do thank you for being a member since almost our founding in 2003
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