Development Info Josh Sawyer on Utility and Balance in Game Design

Roguey, your inspired defense of Sawyer never ceases to please me.

New Vegas was a fairly balanced game, by modern standards, or at least the DLC was. Even at higher levels, there were still some enemies who would give me trouble (fucking deathclaws). Of course, the DLC also raised the level cap to please the popamole crowd, but meh. About as balanced as you can expect from a AAA RPG in this day and age.

 

For which we can be thankful it would seem.

 

Yeah I forgot to mention that New Vegas was specifically tuned for Fallout 3 players. JSawyer was tuned for himself and though food and water are still abundant, the meters were all significantly increased to compensate for that.

Semi-relevant info for the thread (MotB balancing discussion): http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/47858-mask-of-the-betrayer/page__st__140#entry801455

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/47858-mask-of-the-betrayer/page__st__160#entry801497

Five years later and Adam hasn't changed. God damn. He, Avellone, and Urquhart remain on my Obsidian Enemies list. I may put them on probation if they say they won't get in Josh's way.

 

Sawyer hates babbies. :baby:

I knew he was a bro.

 

WTF? MOTB was too difficult???Now i understand were he comes from with his comments. I just hope he understands that his target audience in P:E is not the same as that in their other games

 

LOL

 

Well, feel free to disagree, but I feel this model wouldn't be inappropriate even to a Knights of the Chalice like game. Just to reiterate, I don't want combat removed from its central role in the game. What I want is to see all the other things made to interact more with statistics, class choices and story choices, and made to matter more to combat itself. Take Baldur's Gate 2, for example, it had a whole lot of open ended exploration a lot of conversation, characterization and what not. If sometime even had you choosing a side in conflicts, or giving you tidbits about how you could affect this or that in the gameworld (like getting the location of Firkrag's lair). A bit of the content even was made to reflect your character class, like when you got your keep.

I don't think it would be at all inappropriate for a game like it to try to make these things more RPG like. That is, to make your exploration of new scenarios tied to your skills. To make the order that you approach stuff actually matter. To put difficult decisions of how a scenario can play out in the hands of what skills, classes and even choices you decided earlier on. Likewise,, I feel it would be a very good thing if these had major effects on the combat you experience through the game, which is the main course of it as you pointed out. Depending on how you explore the world, what order you decide to go about, what skills you have, how you interact with npcs, combat will play different. Likewise, depending on how you do in combat, you may have different choices during the other aspects of gameplay, or they may just play different. The slaves you are trying to save from the orcs may be NPCs in a fight, and saving them depends solely on keeping them alive while you deal with the orcs. If you save them all, they will be eternally grateful. Ifhalf of them die, they may consider your party more of a bane than a boon.

And yes, I know expecting all this is unreasonable. I know there is no way PE will be this good of an RPG. But I would really like to see it take some steps in this direction. Of course, imagining all big quests you can find on the map will be tied to the calendar, and evolve organically as time pass, is silly. But if 3 or 4 quests use time in an interesting, thoughtful way, and maybe a couple more using it in a good, if obvious way, I would be very happy indeed.

 

It would be difficult for someone new to D & D.

 

Thank you Roguey for putting that up. I hope he hasn't changed his viewpoints on this, i.e the terrible trio haven't softened him up. I've resigned to having one difficulty level for us (hard - the one Sawyer will play) and two for the nubs (Easy and Normal). Those posts really did make me feel a lot better about Sawyer. Maybe he'll call the difficulties "Story-mode" and "Tactical-story mode" so as not to upset the kiddies who would be offended by playing "easy."

In any case, I've rewatched the video and have been thinking about Sawyer's case, and while I'm not entirely convinced this is a good thing, I think it might work IF PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED (please don't ruin this for me terrible trio....).

Infinitron As such, I've posted your question and Sawyer's answer on the OEI forums for those guys to have a go at it. Perhaps Sawyer will continue the conversation about it there. Wanted to give you a head's up because I didn't name you as the questioner but thought if you wanted to self-promote, you could do so. Edit: I decided to put your name just cuz it was the bro thing to do.
http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/62999-josh-sawyer-balance-and-utility/

 

Yeah, I agree 100%. These are the things that should, hopefully, happen. Really there was none of that in BG II worth mentioning.

It's when he starts talking about the combat really, that my eye starts to twitch. The exploration stuff is one of the greatest parts of an RPG and I think this sort of reactivity really makes a game come alive. But if you start applying all this to combat, and when you take a lot of the stuff he said in the video and analyze it it looks really bad.

Game devs talk a lot about difficulty but no one wants more raw difficulty they want similarly interesting combat where one party might win in a totally different manner than another and have great difficulty with some encounters other parties would breeze through but have some other things to make up for it and that's where it seems like the baby is going to be thrown out with the bath water.

People don't want simple, they want intricacy that sucks them in. Complaining about complain babies. Well, fuck that loser. Seriously.

 

I don't think having your approach defined by skills is really the best way a lot of the time. Especially if it's skills picked independently of combat stuff. It basically amounts to you choosing your approach on the chargen and level ups, instead of deciding what to do as new situations come along. If you're good at X skill, obviously you'll use it every time over Y, no choice to be had.
It's more interesting to base decisions on what happens in the gameworld, on your own actions - f you're a known slaver you're treated differently than if not, for example. Or you might learn lockpicking from a dude in the gameworld, which opens up some possibilities, and is much more interesting to actually have to go out and seek that skill instead of checking a box upon levelup. But if you just kill the guy who'd taught you, you get a different kind of advantage from that.
Of course, branching like this is much more complex thing to do than just checking if a certain skill is above a threshold and acknowledge that.

 

Captain Shrek It would be difficult to a D&D newcomer not because encounters were any difficult, but because the game asks the player to make a 18 level character right at the start. The player can pick a pre-built character but that wouldn't teach much about the ruleset or mechanics. One can create the character from scratch, but making 18 levels without any experience of how they work in-game, it can easily become overwhelming. Therefore a chance of messing up the character and finding the game more difficult than it really is.

 

Well duh. The simpler your game the easier to balance? Does that need to be said? But balance is really unimportant, and the only balancing that feels natural is doing everything by hand. Only game devs really talk about balance in a single player game, and generally as a copout for whatever new round of retarded nonsense they are up to. Which is mainly to make things as dumb as possible to make it easier to produce and make it so anyone on earth can make it through to the next cut scene.

 

I strongly disagree here. The argument is now no longer about the original topic. Of course a newcomer without ANY experience with DnD would find MoTB tough because of the level start. But the intrinsic difficulty of MoTB were it scaled down to low levels would still be EASY at best.

 

You're going to have to ban yourself for trolling if you keep this up.

What he said is he wants the world to react to the skills he has and for it to shape his game experience for quests.

Well, that's exactly what people want for their combat and their party building as well. Differentiation, without it games are crap. NWN II was crap due to undifferentiated encounters. Everything is exactly the same because it's all designed in the most braindead manner. You'd just get swarmed with 500 of the same enemy or fight one big enemy that easily falls to your mages. Over and over.

Instead if I get a thief I want to be able to set up an awesome backstab, I want to be able to have a fighter thief MU that can do even more awesome stuff, or a thief cleric that does other crazy stuff. Instead we got an idiot designing the game who doesn't even know that thief and cleric are most OP classes in DnD as of 3rd edition, or what they are for, let alone how they all work together. And that's why all the NWN encounters were stupid boring crap, it's a guy who didn't ever figure out basics of DnD who's trying to "balance" away any challenge, when ideally you'd have some parties have very difficult time with encounters other parties breeze through, and people who try dumb strategies like an all mage party should get immediately shredded (as they would in PnP). There's some of that in BG series and more of it in toee. NWN II completely failed obviously, and not it doesn't take years of work to make some encounters that are something besides 50 fighters, then later 50 thieves, all in a warehouse inside a major city that's a completely implausible place to fight and rest a hundred times.

What the hell kind of dungeon is that? None of it made any sense. Go kill rats in rat cave is 100 times better than that.

Not to mention you somehow join up with the police force. What is this a bad fox show on late night. Medieval dragon cop, MD?

See what I mean? Well, obviously not or you'd not continue to say such crazy things.

 

If you know how to build an optimal PC (reaching ridiculous defense so that enemies can't really harm you), IWD2 shouldn't be much of a challenge. Haven't really played the game so I might be wrong.

 

The original point from Sawyer was that Adam made a "flat out bad" character.

 

Well it's a fair point to say you ought to be able to complete the game with mediocre characters at least, if not flat out bad ones. But the thing is for me and a lot of people restarting to get a better character is part of the fun. You should be able to figure out after not long an all bard party is tough to deal with and go back and restart.

Problem is it's more episodic content BS. Who wants to sit through the same cutscenes over and over? Which comes back again to sawyer being yet another dev who wants to make noninteractive movies, not games.

 

Correct.

Except that the context is Wrong (not yours, his). Expansions are MEANT for players who have some experience with the original when the original DEPENDS on building complex characters.

Adam should have played NWN2/NWN before attempting this. He is essentially a BELOW AVERAGE player.

 

Adam did play NWN2 before MotB. He also played BG2, TOB, and IWD2 since he cites those games in the very post I quoted. Guy's just a black hole of scrubbery.

They're balancing it for people who enjoyed the combat of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. That's the audience to whom they pitched this idea. "Our KS pitch is driven heavily on platform-specific (PC) nostalgia," "We want to take the best elements from each game to make something new. From BG, the exploration and companion interaction, from IWD, the environments and tactical combat, and from PS:T, the highly-reactive narrative and exploration of mature themes." "The feeling of challenge is a balance between enjoyment and frustration. It is not the same for every player, but it is almost always at some midpoint between those two emotions. My goal is to use a variety of mechanics to find balance points that appeal to this specific audience, varied as it is. I think that instant health regeneration errs too much on the side of ease for this audience" and so on.

They should call the easy setting "Brennecke mode."