Assisted Living Godzilla
Prophet
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2017
- Messages
- 4,106
- Wednesday at 3:45 PM
- #251
Roguey said:
KörangarTheMighty said:
Sarcasm or for real? I always had the perception that Diablo II was wildly more successful compared to BGII due to far lower barrier to entry complexity-wise, very reliable multiplayer etc.
I'm talking about the first one. Diablo wasn't some niche title only known to RPG fans, it was huge. BG was also big. It turned Bioware from a fly-by-night studio into one with enough clout to move Neverwinter Nights from Interplay to Atari. They had so much clout that Obsidian was able to benefit from their success by getting royalties from KOTOR 2 and NWN 2 sales in their contracts (deals they never got again from future publishers).
Assisted Living Godzilla said:
Eventually. Those are lifetime sales numbers. It also feels like you’re missing some of your own post there.
It took Diablo 4 years to reach 2.5 million. BGs:
Worldwide, Baldur's Gate ultimately surpassed 2.2 million sales by early 2003
Baldur's Gate II alone reached almost 1.5 million sales by December 2002, and more than 2 million by November 2005
They're in the same bracket.
Assisted Living Godzilla said:
What point do you think that quote is making that you put there? Knights of the Old Republic came out in 2003. Making adjustments to how combat worked after an E3 2002 showing because people were seemingly having a hard time understanding what BioWare were trying to go for is not any indication that nobody liked the combat of Knights of the Old Republic on release, and that that’s something even BioWare knowns.
"What Went Wrong 1) Using a round-based system"
"The fundamental lesson learned, albeit in retrospect, is that the scale of player actions allowed by a combat system must match the scale of actions on which the system operates"
"In addition, we are actively applying the lessons on what worked well and what didn't work as well to the three new intellectual properties in development at BioWare, one of which, our recently announced Xbox-exclusive title Jade Empire, will be published by Microsoft."
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/3...pg-codex-forum/?do=findComment&comment=541679
Josh Sawyer said:
I've had groin pulls that were more fun than KotOR combats
Assisted Living Godzilla said:
With further hindsight (that postmortem is from 2003) it can safely be said it was a stupid move for them to move away from what they’d done in Knights of the Old Republic with Jade Empire and Mass Effect, both of which would end up preforming worse. Final Fantasy 12 makes it all the weirder too, because there’s a game that has combat much like KotOR, and it sold over 5 million in a year. BioWare must have been aware of FF12 too, I mean they take that game’s Gambit system for Origins.
Why are you acting as if kotor was significantly bigger than their other games?
Total sales of the game's Xbox and computer releases surpassed 2 million copies by February 2005 and 2.5 million by May and reached nearly 3 million by March 2006. As of 2007, Knights of the Old Republic had sold 3.2 million units.
In April 2011, it was reported that both Mass Effect and its sequel have combined sold more than seven million units worldwide
Jade Empire was a misstep, that's why it didn't get a sequel. Mass Effect got a trilogy.
Your Diablo point makes no sense since Diablo is not just the one Diablo game. Diablo as a series, by the early 2000s, was not in the same bracket as BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate series. Diablo 2 is a thing, it came out in the year 2000, it sold 2 million copies in one and a half months. In 2001 Diablo 2 sold half a million more than the combined total sales of both Baldur’s Gate games in 2001. Your point about the first Diablo game is completely nonsensical because there was a second, even bigger, Diablo game that came out a few years later. Even with the first Diablo game sales don’t tell the whole story, the game got a PSX release a year after the PC version, it was in rental places where many different sets of people could play the same one copy over and over again.
You are aware that the lesson he said they learn with the KotOR’s combat system is something they implemented before release. That the problem they picked up on was something they noticed at a E3 showing in 2002 a year before it came out in 2003, and the guy says in the quote you posted that they fixed the problem they saw people having with the game? When your original point is: Even BioWare knew the combat sucked. An anecdote about how they noticed something late in development at a trade show, and fixed it before release, doesn’t make your point. It also doesn’t exactly help if lessons learned for better combat resulted in Jade Empire combat.
Jade Empire didn’t get a sequel because the sequel team just played with their dicks for a few years trying to reinvent a wheel that was already rolling around at the time. I’m sure you read about the utterly stupid development cycle of the Jade Empire sequel that became Project Revolver a few years ago.
