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Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

Israfael

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2012
Messages
3,580
The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders
Yeah, that's how I remembered games when I was a kid: a game with red-assed spiders (Nox), game with rapetastic metallic spiders (Phase/Blade spiders in NWN), game with funny leaky spiders (araches in diablo 2) :salute::lol:
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
Patron
Joined
Jul 22, 2019
Messages
14,131
Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders
Yeah, that's how I remembered games when I was a kid: a game with red-assed spiders (Nox), game with rapetastic metallic spiders (Phase/Blade spiders in NWN), game with funny leaky spiders (araches in diablo 2) :salute::lol:

Giant Spider = last card to appear in all MtG core sets.
 

Viata

Arcane
Joined
Nov 11, 2014
Messages
9,885
Location
Water Play Catarinense
Think of any great high fantasy game, think of it now without any giant spiders. Pretty SHIT, right? Feels like it's MISSING something, huh?

Baldur's Gate 1 for example, Cloakwood, where are the eight leggers? Where the webspinners at? It's a desolate zone. What will you replace me with? BANDITS? Hahaha, yeah, you haven't killed THAT two hundred times before. Hobgoblins? Oh please. I'm a monster manual staple.

Have you ever SEEN game design meetings? The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders. In that order. Face it, punk, I'm here to stay. Come into my lair, or my forest, or my swamp, collect your BEEFY 300 xp, and shaddup. I've met elven women with bigger BALLS than you arachnophobes.

Trying to run me out of a job, nigga fuk u. Been doing this since Tolkien days.
What we need is less generic spiders. There are a fuckton of amazing spiders out there:
 
Self-Ejected

Lichtbringer

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jun 12, 2019
Messages
100
"If you reveal your baby's sex 'gender' at a reveal party then you are literally a Nazi that kills people with pipe bombs and here is why."

:npc:
 

hexer

Guest
Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,648
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
"If you reveal your baby's sex 'gender' at a reveal party then you are literally a Nazi that kills people with pipe bombs and here is why."

:npc:
aMRQn62_d.jpg
Is this not enough evidence for you that gender reveal parties are pissing off God?
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence
Well if even the government talks about this as a conspiracy theory....then must be 99% legit thing.
 

Butter

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
7,523
Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence
They don't need to put it in the water. They put it on the television.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
New rule: explosions allowed at gender reveals only if the gender revealed is attack helicopter.
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214


Yep, even such a minor feature like follow-cam can have great influence on gameplay for many people.

Before anything else PoE is fundamentally unintuitive on the most basic of levels compared to DOS: marquee selecting characters; you'll have to do it and manage your party all the time, its no concern for a usual crpg player but its a hassle for a normie. Its easier to control just one character and others to follow you. Same thing with RTwP, you'll have to "manage" it instead of waiting a turn and taking action.

Bioware managed to make the IE style appeal to mainstream with DAO by removing these basic obstacles for starters.
 

jac8awol

Arbiter
Joined
Feb 2, 2018
Messages
408
Ok I've seen a few vids of Josh in the past, and can you seriously imagine this guy sitting down with anyone in the team and being like 'your idea sucks, get your shit together!' No way, and this is a problem that I guess is endemic to US game development, the idea that people deserve some kind of participation trophy, that no one is ever wrong, that we need to respect everyone's opinion.

Bullshit! There's a serious lack of testosterone in Obsidian's games, and it's been sucking the coherence out of their world-building for years.
 

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
Patron
Joined
Jun 15, 2017
Messages
3,152
Location
Jamrock District
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Ok I've seen a few vids of Josh in the past, and can you seriously imagine this guy sitting down with anyone in the team and being like 'your idea sucks, get your shit together!' No way, and this is a problem that I guess is endemic to US game development, the idea that people deserve some kind of participation trophy, that no one is ever wrong, that we need to respect everyone's opinion.

Are you kidding me? You can't imagine Josh Sawyer telling his subordinates that their ideas suck? You might want to lurk more. Sawyer's the kind of guy who'll tell you your ideas are bad then give you thirty PowerPoint slides explaining why he's right and you're wrong. I don't remember if it was Sawyer himself or Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky who joked that Josh is Obsidian's in-house autist, but that's not the kind of nickname you get for being respectful of everyone else's opinions. He strikes me as someone who can't resist correcting other people's mistakes, even when it's inappropriate or he's actually in the wrong, although he's probably polite about it. Roguey?

If anything, POE 1 & 2 had the opposite problem. Josh has extremely strong preferences about game design and narrative. That's why he was so dismissive of player feedback that clashed with his worldview while he was making Pillars. It's why Pillars has a more subdued setting and story than the epic Infinity Engine games it was supposed to be mimicking (POE only gets truly epic in the third act and even then it undercuts itself), not to mention more grounded (read less memorable) characters. Sawyer was pretty effective at enforcing these mandates, except where senior management overruled him.

Even if he'd had a better vision, he was in no position to give his team effective criticism. Sawyer's not a big fan of Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 and he doesn't particularly like epic fantasy. He's come pretty close to admitting that he never really understood what people loved about these games, so how the hell was he supposed to know what sucks and what doesn't? He kept flailing around during Deadfire's development, trying to discover what people really want based on POE's reviews, player criticism, and the telemetry data from both the first game and the beta.

Last but not least, he admits he neglected the story stuff in Deadfire. Negligence =/= participation trophies. Sawyer had too many responsibilities and he dropped the ball. Plus, maybe he learned the wrong lesson from POE. The story in Pillars was lackluster, yet the game sold ridiculously well. I can see why he might've concluded that players have low standards so it's not worth stressing about the narrative.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
Patron
Joined
Jul 22, 2019
Messages
14,131
Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Are you kidding me?

Nope.

T-level loss is real and it's spectacular(ly devastating).

Josh went from this:

"I was someone who, I grew up playing D&D, I played a tonne of it at university, too much at university, and I kind of just assumed that everyone understood how to play D&D, and so I designed combat and counters that were just ruthless, and brutal, and psychotic."

To a dude afraid of his own shadow.

The dumbing down defenses are an ex post facto rationalization of his own fecklessness. If he really hated BG like he pretends to now he'd have never signed on for PoE in the first place.

Exit the warrior, today's Josh Sawyer.
 

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