anichea asked:
Hey Josh, your deadfire postmortem and follow up posts have (naturally) focused on the bits of the game that players and reviewers had issues with. Taken alone, they end up giving the impression that you were pretty disspointed with the way the game turned out overall. But Deadfire is still a really well reviewed game (and one of my favourite RPGs ever). I'd appreciate hearing which bits of the game you thought were really sucessful, and how they evolved during development.
I have to say that I think the team really did great work overall. The failures of the game were more due to leadership decisions than anything on the part of the larger dev team. Some things of
particular note:
I think that the narrative designers and faction quest designers did a fantastic job building up the factions. How they are introduced, how they are developed, and how the player gets integrated into their organizations (or into opposing them) was a lot of difficult work. It required a lot of up-front planning, a lot of implementation time, and, critically, a ton of time for reviewing and revising the faction content. Because of how the faction quest lines overlap each other, it also required a lot of constant communication between different designers. Carrie Patel (narrative co-lead with me) directed the narrative designers and Bobby Null (lead designer and area lead) helped architect the faction questlines.
Faction leaders, gods, and companions were all wonderful. All of the narrative designers involved did terrific work and the artists captured them well both in their concepts and their final execution. Of course, I also think all of the voice actors who brought them to life were awesome.
Along the same lines, our concept artists and character artists were instrumental in developing the distinctive looks of the factions, their outfits, and their leaders. Incredible work by everyone involved, but I want to credit Lindsey Laney and Matt Hansen for the work they did on faction outfits/styles and 2d portraits, respectively. Furthermore, all of our 2D art was just incredible, from the UI reskin that Mitch Loidolt did to the massive amount of icons and black and white illustrations that Lindsey and Matt did. Phenomenal work and it’s honestly incredible they produced it all at such a high level of quality.
Our environment artists built what I think is the most beautiful isometric RPG to date. I think it will hold up well over time (as many beautiful iso RPGs do). Kaz Aruga, our lead artist, and Sean Dunny, our environment lead, set an extremely high quality bar. Kaz worked very closely with our programmers to refine the environment/light/shadow rendering in Deadfire and the leap in quality between Pillars 1 and Deadfire is huge (IMO, anyway).
Dimitri Berman, James Chea, and Ian Randall massively improved our character models. We caught some justifiable criticism for the quality of character models in Pillars 1, but I was very happy with our Deadfire models. For a team that had (effectively) only two character artists I think they did a great job. The personality poses and fidgets that Seth McCaughey animated for our companions also really brought the characters to life.
I think our visual effects in Pillars 1 were good, but somewhat hampered by renderer limitations in Unity 4. In Deadfire, John Lewis and James Melilli knocked it out of the park. The programming team’s work (especially Adam Brennecke’s) on revising the rendering pipeline also massively helped with combat legibility and overall visual quality.
The system designers managed to make what I think is a pretty great multiclassing system with a ton of subclass options that’s very robust and well-balanced (in terms of viability). Dave Williams, Nick Carver, Brian Heins, Matt Sheets, and John Schmauz had an enormous amount of critters, spells, companion tables, and abilities to implement and tune. Even though the balance was off at launch, that had much more to do with the breadth of features in the game how I prioritized time than with the work that they did.
There are other people that I haven’t mentioned, but again, the team did great work. And to re-state what I said in my talk, I think the DLC team really raised the bar above the quality of the main game. Tighter, more well-paced stories, beautiful visuals, cool new characters, and some really wild combat content/item goodies. DLCs are often rated below the games that spawned them, but I really don’t understand why, especially in RPGs, where they often feel like significant refinements. They certainly did for Deadfire (IMO, IMO, IMO, etc.).