The "modern" players weren't generally impressed with the bugs and performance issues, hence why vast majority of the negative reviews are related to bugs/performance issues and no so much about the game play itself._noblesse_oblige_ wrote: ↑November 1st, 2018, 7:41 pmNot necessarily. Games tuned to a niche tend not to attract as many people outside that niche. I'll use an example I've cited in another conversation: the Dominions games by Illwinter. Most people are turned off by the 600+ manual and the fairly weak GUI, but yet the games have very high ratings on Steam. Why? Because most of the people who weren't interested in them didn't bother buying them. But, the series does have a cult following of hardcore strategy gamers.eisberg wrote: ↑November 1st, 2018, 7:22 pmIsn't that assuming that the audience of the originals would outnumber the the amount of new people to the series? Not many people played the Trilogy, especially when 33k people got it for free, so that suggest that the actual people who are fans of how the originals were are small in numbers, and those people would most likely be by far outnumbered by the number of new people to the series, which would most likely make the reception actually even worse than it is now._noblesse_oblige_ wrote: ↑November 1st, 2018, 4:38 pm
I don't know if it would've sold better, but it almost certainly would've had better reception, because the originals have a real following - an actual audience which can be understood. Look at the popularity of the remasters. If there was no faithful fan base, they would not have been as well received as they have been.
One problem with Barrows Deep, as delivered, is that inXile didn't have a clear target audience and cast a wide net, trying to throw in a little bit for everyone, which ended up pleasing no one. They hyped the game in various ways in the gaming media in attempt to draw in "modern" players. The "modern" players generally weren't impressed and neither were most of the old school players. By contrast, Illwinter knows who their audience is. Krome knows who their audience is. The reception of their games reflects that.
And Inxile has never been about making niche games, they never have been like that, so the idea that they would all of a sudden make a flagship game as a niche game was very much an unreasonable expectation.
So it would have been far more likely that if they stayed closer to the originals than the reception would have been far worse even if it didn't have the bugs/performance problems.
It it with no doubt had the performance/bug problem had not existed, that the reception would have easily been 75+%