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Another visit to Poland: http://digitaldragons.pl/programme/speakers/josh-sawyer/
Josh Sawyer
Obsidian Entertainment
Breaking the Mold: RPG Evolution and Paradigm Shifts in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
Speech Description
This post-mortem of Deadfire will examine the assumptions the team made between the first game and the sequel, how expectations changed through the public beta, and what lessons they learned after the game was released. The talk will focus on narrative design, combat design, the ship combat system, and the decision to fully voice all dialogue. The end of the post-mortem will deal with post-launch support, including patches, features, and other DLC content.
15:00-15:45, May 27th.
A takeaway from last week: https://www.pcgamesinsider.biz/list...at-we-learnt-at-digital-dragons-2019/entry/3/
Be careful about the feedback you get from your most dedicated fans
Game developers need to be careful with the feedback they get from their most hardcore fans.
That's according to Obsidian Entertainment director Josh Sawyer, who said in session discussing Pillars of Eternity 2's launch that the studio had a backer beta for users that helped crowdfund the title on Kickstarter.
The development vet said that the feedback you gain from this audience needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, with the same being true for projects in initiatives like Early Access.
"There's some tricky things about backer betas - it's very limited content and it's a very limited audience," he told the audience at Digital Dragons.
"Anyone who has done Early Access also knows there are dangers to this. For those of you who want to do this type of thing, understand that your audience is self-selected to the most hardcore and enthusiastic people. They give very big feedback, but it is also feedback for psychotic gamers. They have the strongest opinions, they're going to grind your game into the dust. It is very valuable, but it can skew your understanding of how your game plays for a wider audience. Also, the longer a beta goes on for, it becomes a well-trod path. Unless you're going to put a load of new content out every time you update the backer beta, people are going to run that over and over again and it can lead to a very strange perception of difficulty, for example, or quality of writing. No writing seems that great if you've seen it 20 times. There's a little bit of a problem sometimes with content that is overused and over-iterated on."