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Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/185759436361/the-armor-formula-in-nv-was-pretty-sophisticated#notes

mattradicalphd asked:

The armor formula in NV was pretty sophisticated and non-obvious. What were the goals for it and why use the formula you did, as opposed to others?

I don’t think it was particularly sophisticated, and it does have an in-game pop-up where you can read (ignore) the fine details of how it’s operating.

I had a few goals.

* Allow “infinite” scalability (which %-based DR logically cannot).
* Prevent total damage negation (which is where the 20% Min damage comes from).
* Allow small caliber, high RoF firearms to be easily contrasted with large caliber, low RoF firearms by their viability against different levels of DT.
* Fairly easy to understand that higher number = more protection in a linear fashion.

The system is pretty straightforward: DT is subtracted directly from each “tick” of incoming damage, but damage can never be reduced below 20% of its initial value.

It was pretty easy to mock up in an Excel spreadsheet to see how different damage values interacted with different DT values in individual instances. Those instances could then be multiplied over a RoF to indicate “true” DPS assuming 100% accuracy without crits.

To be clear, the spreadsheets were only a starting point and a tuning aid. They were never a replacement for actually playing the game and seeing the impact that changing weapon / armor stats had in play. In fact, I went back to look at my working Excel sheets and I had not updated them since early March of 2010 (7 months prior to shipping the game). Once we were in full production, all tuning was done in editor/engine, not in a spreadsheet.

tumblr_inline_pth5ciO5cT1ri73pi_1280.png

The places where the DT system failed to hold up were the places where pure DT systems typically fail: extremely low value, high RoF damage applications (where DT almost immediately reduces damage to the minimum threshold) and huge burst damage (e.g. from a mini nuke).

To address the latter concern, I re-introduced low DR values to armor in my jsawyer patch. In cases where a character is hit by something for 100 points of damage (e.g.) and they’re wearing 12 DT armor with 15% DR, the DR provides a more sizable amount of reduction.
 

Quillon

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MS saw his potential and moved him down the hall. He'll do great from janitor's closet! NV2 hype! AP2 confirmed! PoE3 cancelled! DS4 in the works! KotOR3 here we go! NWN3 will be slamdunk!
 

Roguey

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I've begun the terribly long process of converting Sawyer's old formspring into something presentable for a forum post (or series of posts) and ran across these early answers from 2010

To what extent do your political or religious ideologies inform your design decisions?
It may be because I studied history in the postmodern tradition, but I'm not particularly interested in promoting anything other than, "Understanding things from different viewpoints is cool," or "People are complicated and do things for a lot of different reasons." I guess an extension of that is the idea that the player is the person who determines "validity", not the author.

Follow up to auteur question: Do you think an individual SHOULD be the crux of design (and therefore have the game be a reflection of his/her own personality and opinions) or is the fairly standard collectivist "design team" process preferable?
Collectivist design processes arguably make the team feel "better"/more egalitarian, but I think the end product suffers for it. Everyone should be able to contribute, but those contributions need to work within an overarching vision.

Most people playing the game won't know anything about who made it. They just want a cohesive and fun experience. Think of it this way: if five people argue for different designs and the result is something that they all grudgingly accept with various concessions, how compelling can that really be?

And I don't really think the vision should be "about" the design director/lead designer/overlord. As with most stories, I think game stories work best when they are more about the audience's opinions and decisions than the author's opinions and biases. My biases certainly affect theme and subject matter, but I try to leave interpretations open to the player. Who wants to be lectured at by a game?

Sounding awfully Boyarsky and Avellone there. More proof of his current senility.
 

Quillon

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I've begun the terribly long process of converting Sawyer's old formspring into something presentable for a forum post

Trying to remind him of his glorious self, eh?

giphy.gif


You're doing the lord's work
rating_salute.gif
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

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I've begun the terribly long process of converting Sawyer's old formspring into something presentable for a forum post (or series of posts) and ran across these early answers from 2010

To what extent do your political or religious ideologies inform your design decisions?
It may be because I studied history in the postmodern tradition, but I'm not particularly interested in promoting anything other than, "Understanding things from different viewpoints is cool," or "People are complicated and do things for a lot of different reasons." I guess an extension of that is the idea that the player is the person who determines "validity", not the author.

Follow up to auteur question: Do you think an individual SHOULD be the crux of design (and therefore have the game be a reflection of his/her own personality and opinions) or is the fairly standard collectivist "design team" process preferable?
Collectivist design processes arguably make the team feel "better"/more egalitarian, but I think the end product suffers for it. Everyone should be able to contribute, but those contributions need to work within an overarching vision.

Most people playing the game won't know anything about who made it. They just want a cohesive and fun experience. Think of it this way: if five people argue for different designs and the result is something that they all grudgingly accept with various concessions, how compelling can that really be?

And I don't really think the vision should be "about" the design director/lead designer/overlord. As with most stories, I think game stories work best when they are more about the audience's opinions and decisions than the author's opinions and biases. My biases certainly affect theme and subject matter, but I try to leave interpretations open to the player. Who wants to be lectured at by a game?

Sounding awfully Boyarsky and Avellone there. More proof of his current senility.
Women mostly select men for the values of her immediate society, so if he's trying to keep a woman her approval will always drive him. That's how you end up with male feminists (the non creepy kind that fell into feminism to conform, not the balding fat one's throwing shade).
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

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I hate Josh but also love him. Like he's the kind of dude I'd wanna punch a lot, but also the kind of dude I wanna be. Like when gays are secret gays and become pastors and tell everyone gays are bad but make out with dudes in bathrooms.
TOM SELLECK
The irony of this post.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Mordhau Sawyerized: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/186864901581/unsolicited-opinions-on-improvements-for-mordhaus

Unsolicited Opinions on Improvements for Mordhau’s Frontline Mode

In spite of not being particularly good at them, I’ve been a fan of competitive team-based, objective-oriented FPSes going back to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Battlefield: 1942. When they’re good, they’re great. The thrill of victory/agony of defeat on map like W:ET’s Fuel Dump is hard to match in either a single player game or a standard DM/TDM environment.

When I saw that Mordhau was coming out with a team-based, objective-oriented mode (Frontline), I was thrilled. Mordhau’s combat is challenging and I always appreciate when something is…

719d71a6fd0cb8e42b7c717c908bac4fd6848a28.png

There are problems with balance (HORSES) and, as with any online competitive game, the in-game chat being a vortex of brain-destroying negative energy, but the developers at Triternion have already discussed plans to address those issues. And while they’ve also discussed plans to look at Frontline, that’s not going to stop me, who has no experience working directly on team-based, objective-oriented FPSes (other than giving advice on Armored Warfare, I guess… ), from giving my unsolicited opinions on how Frontline could be improved as a mode of gameplay.

I’m an RPG designer, so if anyone reading this wants to dismiss these ideas immediately, feel free. Take ‘em or leave ‘em, baby!

Things I’m not Going to Address (Except Here)


It’s worth saying things that I’m not going to really dive into because I don’t think they’re problems with Frontline as a mode. First, weapon balance. I have opinions on how weapons and weapon costs are balanced in Mordhau as a whole, but I don’t think any Frontline map is made or broken because of overall weapon balance. Horses and firebombs are sort of the exception here, but Triternion has already acknowledged problems with both, so there’s no point to beating on that billhooked horse.

Second, in-game chat being a cesspool of idiocy. I mean, it absolutely is, but it’s also 100% unnecessary for playing Frontline. Because Frontline has a single conflict point at any given moment of the game, it’s really rare that any deep team coordination is required. And if the mode evolves to require better coordination, it would be better served by the existing voiced in-character quick bark system (which is not dissimilar in overall structure to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory’s) than by requiring characters to type in / read text chat.

As a reminder, you can disable the chat log entirely from the options menu. In my experience, it is only an improvement.
Asymmetry

One of the first enormous hurdles to achieving good gameplay balance on any Frontline map is that every Frontline map has either asymmetrical map layouts, asymmetrical objectives, or asymmetrical map layouts and objectives.

It’s hard to un-ring the bell on these design decisions, but it’s important to recognize that when both the layouts and objectives are asymmetrical, it’s significantly more challenging for designers to achieve what feels like (to players) a fair set of challenges for both teams.

On maps where the layouts are close to symmetrical (e.g. Mountain Peak), it’s important to ensure that the final stage objectives feel like they require a similar amount of time, effort, and focus to complete. Of course, Mountain Peak’s final stage objectives don’t require a similar amount of time, effort, and focus to complete, so whether your team wins or loses once pushed back to their final spawn can feel like a tooth-and-nail struggle (pushing the ram to red) or like you suddenly lose out of nowhere without even seeing the final objective fall (burning tents in blue).

To compare these two objective types, we can look at how they work in games like Overwatch or W:ET. The ram at red is like an Overwatch payload and other than the fact that it moves, it’s not much different from flag objectives in Frontline. Blue players stand around the ram and it moves – unless red players stand in the area and/or kill the blue players in the area. Unlike an Overwatch payload (or the train car on W:ET’s Rail Gun), the defending team cannot reverse the direction of the ram once it starts moving. They can only stop it (reclaiming their nearest flag will also halt forward progress). The ram is easy to track and players from both teams can try to dogpile onto it (or the nearby flag).

In contrast, the tents that blue has to defend are spread out over a relatively large area. A single red player can throw a torch and light up a tent and there’s not much blue can do to stop it. Of course, red can just forget to do it, which is a real and separate problem, but all of these problems contribute to making the final objectives feel massively different in terms of the effort and coordination required to accomplish them.

It would probably be easier to change the objectives on Mountain Peak than to try to use map layout as a balancing factor. On maps like Grad, where the layout is so totally asymmetrical, making the final objectives more symmetrical could help a lot. Even if both red and blue had to destroy three carts, the layouts of the final objective zones are so fundamentally different that the experience would be inherently different. And that’s really the goal, right? That it feels different winning as blue than it does winning as red? I believe most players would rather have symmetrical objectives that feel more balanced for each side than to have asymmetrical objectives that feel massively lopsided in execution.

Map Refinement


This is related to asymmetry, but is a separate issue. There’s a lot that could be edited out or changed on each of the existing Frontline maps to make gameplay more enjoyable. A relatively minor, but significant, change on Taiga’s layout made a huge impact on the viability of blue taking the central flag. There are two types of map refinements that are important: large scale and polish.

Large scale issues are things like Grad’s subterranean dungeon. I would argue it doesn’t need to exist at all, but a reasonable argument could me made that having another path into the castle is valuable for red. Still, it could be cut in half in terms of overall complexity/size and it would still accomplish the same goal.

Another large scale issue is the distance of blue’s spawn from the center of Crossroads relative to the distance from red’s spawn. Blue’s is quite a bit farther away and their path is obstructed far more than red’s. Additionally, red horses can (and do, nonstop, every match) run circles through blue’s spawn. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that the base spawn of each team should be blocked from continuous horse access.

In general, looking at each team’s spawns relative to the capture point between them, consider if each team has a similar burden to access the capture circle in terms of distance, obstruction, and vulnerability to enemy harrying tactics (i.e., prior to even entering the circle). If they don’t, address those as part of large scale map changes.

Polish issues are things like the myriad small collision hangups that exist on almost every map. E.g. on Crossroads, overhead clearance between the ground and stairs in the central fort, the chunk of debris on the ground just around the NE corner of the base of the central fort, and red’s ramps over the palisade wall. Making movement collision accurately model every bump and nook and cranny produces frustrating experiences for players. Smooth out the collision to produce walking surfaces that don’t stop player movement because of minor, almost imperceptible height differences. If smoothing the collision out makes it differ too much from the world geometry, change them both.

Catapults, Trebs, and Similar Instant Death Machines


Speaking personally, I don’t think these add any value to Frontline. When I get killed by one of them, ¾ times I had no indication that danger was imminent and in many situations there was nothing I could to avoid death. E.g. on Grad, it’s easy for red to launch catapult shot over the wall into the smithy, giving even players who are looking in that direction less than half a second to react (i.e., realize they will die) to the enormous stone sphere as it crests the wall.

If these siege weapons continue to be a part of Grad, Camp, and other maps, please give players an audio/visual cue - regardless of where they’re looking - that death is inbound.

Airstrikes and artillery in W:ET are preceded by colored smoke and distinctive sounds that give players a window of opportunity to get out of the way. I’m not saying there should be smoke where they will land, but a better audio cue would go a long way to making siege weapon deaths feel less random and arbitrary. Yes, silent death from a catapult is realistic, but it’s obnoxious from a gameplay perspective and can instantly change an objective from being threatened to being completely cleared.

Better Audio Cues


Players have a difficult time focusing on Frontline. It’s just human nature. There’s a reason why Overwatch focuses everyone toward a single payload that they stand on.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory used voice of god-style announcements to indicate when major map-critical events were occurring and to tell players what they were supposed to be doing. At the start of Fuel Dump, the Axis announcer says, “Don’t let them construct the bridge! Construct the command post!” When the Allies construct the bridge, the announcer yells, “Bridge constructed! Destroy it!” The announcer keeps track of every major game state and constantly reminds the players where they stand on the map. When dynamite is planted on an objective, everyone in the game is made aware of it and it focuses their efforts on defusing it / ensuring it goes off. Critically, there is a window in which the defending team can rush to the objective and stop / reverse what has been set in motion.

In Frontline, when enemies are attacking a flag, players on the defending team don’t get an audio cue until the tide has turned in the attackers’ favor. But by that point, if a player is not already involved in the defense of the flag, it’s unlikely that they can reach the flag in time to make a difference. Better and more audio cues about the state of an objective would help focus players more on the objectives than they currently do (not much).

Audio cues can also apply to player-initiated barks being broadcast across the team. Yes, spam can be a problem, but muting players should be an easy process in any competitive online game. Mordhau already has a robust set of voice barks, but they’re only heard in proximity to the player and most of them aren’t useful in any practical sense. Being able to yell for help isn’t that appealing when it’s limited to a 15′ radius around you and everyone in that radius can already see someone feint morphing a maul into your face.

However, being able to call for help or reinforcements and having it broadcast to the team with an on-screen indicator of your location or the nearest active objective – that could be quite helpful. Arguably one screen of the commands could be reorganized to only and always be team-wide barks: Hold, Follow Me, Help, and Charge. Need Healing or Need Repairs could also be added to the list.

Point Scoring and Display


Even players who elect to play Frontline are often awful at actually focusing on the objectives. A lot of players go into it as though it’s TDM. How many times have you seen Crossroads end and the losing team has a proud player at the top of the leaderboard with a 50:3 K:D due to running down the enemy team’s spawn with a horse for the whole match?

K:D is a fine metric for success in DM or TDM, but it’s not the point of Frontline – at least, it isn’t when it’s away from the objectives. I think there are a variety of changes that could be made to scoring and to the display of scores to help focus people on the objectives.

First, killing and, arguably, dying on or near an active objective should be weighted as more valuable than killing random enemies 75m away from an active objective. Players currently accrue points for neutralizing and capturing an objective, but if the needle isn’tmoving, they don’t earn any points for fighting on the objective. This discourages proactive defense and doesn’t motivate attacking players to push fights into the objective unless the odds are already heavily in their favor.

Damaging blockades (with anything other than firebombs, anyway) and repairing them are tedious, often dangerous activities that arguably do more to aid/hinder access to the objective than killing an individual unit. Since firebomb damage is being tuned, it may be worth considering increasing the score bonus for damaging or repairing blockades to encourage more players to prioritize taking down barriers before entering melee with people in the general vicinity.

For Frontline, consider highlighting score in a lighter color (vs. K/D/A) and either adding additional stats (healing, capture, and repair/destruction score contributions) or only showing the player’s K/D/A (no one else’s) to de-emphasize the importance of K/D/A. I’ve seen a lot of posts online where players post screenshots of someone “scandalously” at the top of a Frontline scoreboard with a poor or mediocre K/D/A. Yes, it’s not DM/TDM, it’s Frontline. The point is ostensibly about pushing objectives and helping your teammates do that. The way points are scored and displayed should emphasize that, with K/D/A only being one element.

Supply Boxes and Their Placement


I have pretty mixed feelings about deployable objects in games of this type, but rather than advocate removing any of those things, I’m going to suggest rethinking the inclusion of supply boxes and, if they stay in the game, where they are placed. Supply boxes are the easiest way to build ballistae and for that reason, where they are placed can have a huge impact on the defensive capabilities of the team controlling the space around the supply boxes.

If the developers’ intention is that ballistae should be used mostly defensively, supply boxes should be placed primarily away from central objectives, and not close to lines of sight that point toward central objectives. This promotes back-and-forth gameplay across the center, rather than entrenching the dominant team’s position at the center.

Transparency and Tuning in Objective Capture Mechanics


It’s not currently obvious to most players how the capture mechanics on an objective work. What changes the objective from Attacking to Capturing? What ratio of attackers vs. defenders are required? Some UI changes could help highlight exactly what’s happening.

Finally, I urge the developers to think about the timing of captures and how that works with spawning mechanics. It’s common for a defender on an objective to die, be unable to respawn before the objective is considered “Losing” and, after respawning, be able to reach the objective before it is fully captured by the enemy.

Is this the desired pacing of objective captures? I would guess that something more forgiving is desired. Once an objective is “Losing”, if it’s technically impossible for respawning defenders to reach the objective in time to prevent it from being fully captured, it can be extremely frustrating. Tuning the pacing of objective captures can help make the back and forth feel less hopeless, more satisfying.

Thanks for reading.
 
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Quillon

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Its been too long since he balanced a game... poor guy.

flashforward couple months:

BREAKING NEWS: GAME INDUSTRY IS RESTLESS AS ONE CRAZED DEVELOPER GOES ON A BALANCING SPREE! ONE DEVELOPER SAID NO GAME IS SAFE ANYMORE! MORE AT 11!
 
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vortex

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He relapsed from the balance. New Sawyer on the rise.

flashforward couple months:
BREAKING NEWS: GAME INDUSTRY IS RESTLESS AS ONE CRAZED DEVELOPER GOES ON A BALANCING SPREE! ONE DEVELOPER SAID NO GAME IS SAFE ANYMORE! MORE AT 11!

Also flashforward:

GAME BALANCE WARRIOR (GBW) seeks perfect equilibrium in order to stabilize correct gameplay proportions.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/187098907586/why-do-the-guns-new-to-new-vegas-differ-so

medior33 asked:

why do the guns new to New Vegas differ so remarkably in aesthetic + design from 3. I'm thinking the 9mm, was this something to do w/ the American southwest vs. the east coast, or what

I didn’t think of making the F:NV guns differ from F3 as much as I tried to return to what I believed was the spirit of Fallout 1 & 2 guns: a mix of common real-world guns, some real-world niche guns, and some completely fictional guns.

I also felt like Fallout 1 (especially) had great gun progression. I really liked how even though the Desert Eagle .44 did more damage than the 10mm pistol, it had a lower ammo cap. Also, because the .44 Magnum ammo is relatively rare (IIRC) when you get the first DE from Garl, it promotes more deliberate, considered use of the weapon and suggests keeping the 10mm pistol around as backup. That sort of overlapping/orthogonal progression is great and I tried to achieve it in F:NV. I always tried to make the “upgrade” of a weapon have one thing that was obviously inferior to / different from the previous version. With the .357 Magnum Revolver and .44 Magnum Revolver, the .357 is slightly more accurate and can never suffer a malfunction/jam.

F3 did some things with ammo types that I understand and appreciate from a game design perspective but I felt contrasted too much from real-world weapon/ammo design. The fact that a handgun and a rifle shared an ammo type is nice for gameplay, but .32 is an odd caliber to use for a number of reasons. One of the things that bothered me most was the use of a similar ammo type in a revolver (typically using rimmed cartridges) and a bolt-action rifle (typically using rimless cartridges and headspacing at the front of the cartridge). Because I liked a more (American) western aesthetic for F:NV, I decided to use rimmed “cowboy cartridges” for revolvers and lever-action rifles. This was extremely common back in the day and can still be done with modern revolvers and lever-actions in the same caliber. The hunting rifle (.32 in F3) went to .308, which we reserved for high-powered rifles and didn’t use in handguns.

In general, when we used real-world weapons and ammo types, I tried to go with ones ordinary people (well, Americans, anyway) were familiar with: .22 LR 9mm, 10mm, .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, 5.56mm, .308, .50 MG. The ones that were made up (12.7mm) or less familiar (.45-70 Gov’t) were generally reserved for later weapons.

The real-world weapons were also sort of a “greatest hits” list: the 9mm based on the Browning Hi-Power, the .357 based on the Colt SAA, etc. - classic designs for people familiar with them that looked great for players who weren’t familiar with them. At times we had to adjust the design for animation/gameplay purposes, e.g. the Automatic Rifle in Dead Money is recognizable as some kind of BAR knockoff, but it differs in some significant ways.

I based the anti-materiel rifle on the Hécate II because honestly I was/am sick of seeing Barretts in games and I think the Hécate II looks better.
 
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Nutria

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Strap Yourselves In
I guess if he's gun nerd as well as a hipster bike nerd they cancel out. One might almost say it's... balanced.
 
Self-Ejected

Carls Barkley

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Playground Games is based in Warwick. He was likely sent to consult on Fable 4.
 

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