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Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's historical mystery narrative-driven game set in 16th century Bavaria

Nano

Arcane
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Mar 6, 2016
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4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
With this art direction and Sawyer writing the whole game, I'd say we have a :slamdunk:on our hands.
Seriously though. This is horrible. Why the fuck would anyone hire this bitch?
 

Modron

Arcane
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
9,934
t-2 years for jossie sawyer to come out
Edit: works just fine for me but here have an imgur uploaded version of a lady looking like Sawyer.
1oP37qh.png
 
Last edited:

KVVRR

Learned
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Apr 28, 2020
Messages
594
With this art direction and Sawyer writing the whole game, I'd say we have a :slamdunk:on our hands.
Seriously though. This is horrible. Why the fuck would anyone hire this bitch?
If you look at the artstation links there are some pieces that look ok, good and even great. Hell some of the pieces in that spoiler are from over 4-6 years ago (the artstation hasn't been updated in 2). It's not unusual for artists to just dump every piece they've made into their portfolio regardless of how good they might look since you really just need a few standouts to show people you have the potential to do great stuff.
Now, does this translate in actual good art while under the pressure of being under an actual project with (pressumably) an actual deadline? We'll see.
 

Duraframe300

Arcane
Joined
Dec 21, 2010
Messages
6,395

check the bio


They/She

:hmmm:

I mean what? How? Wha......

Of all the pronoun bullshit I've encountered I'm actually baffled at how you build a sentence with this in any even remotely understandable manner.
I mean I've seen she/they, but apparently that wasn't special enough for this creature.
 

pomenitul

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μεταβολή
No, what that usually means is they're fine with being referred to via either feminine or neutral pronouns. So you can use she/her and she wouldn't mind.
 

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://www.ign.com/articles/josh-sawyer-pentiment-mystery-medieval-manuscript

Obsidian's Xbox-Exclusive Pentiment Is a 16th Century Mystery Styled Like a Medieval Manuscript
Follow a medieval artist who keeps getting wrapped up in murder cases.

After a number of rumors, the next project from Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has finally been revealed: it is indeed called Pentiment, and it's a narrative crime story of sorts set in 16th century Bavaria and styled like a medieval manuscript.

While we got a look at a visually fascinating trailer at Xbox's showcase today, IGN spoke with Sawyer ahead of the announcement about what exactly Pentiment is. As Sawyer explains it, Pentiment follows a medieval artist named Andreas Maler, an educated journeyman who's near to becoming a master artist. While visiting an abbey to make an illuminated manuscript, a monk who is also Andreas' friend and mentor is accused of a murder he claims he didn't commit. Since no one else steps in to solve the case, Andreas dedicates himself to finding the real killer.

Sawyer tells us that key to Pentiment is that it never explicitly tells you who the murderer really is. Andreas will have to decide who he thinks committed the murder, or at least who he thinks should be punished for it even if it isn't the actual murderer. And those decisions will ripple out through the rest of Pentiment, which covers a span of around 25 years and multiple crimes and murders that Andreas keeps getting caught up in.

Though there are mysteries at its heart, Sawyer is adamant that Pentiment isn't explicitly a detective game, because it doesn't contain typical detective mechanics. He says it's more of a narrative adventure with mystery and murder elements, and as per his past work, lots of player choice.

"There will be familiar elements in terms of choice and background development and consequence for people who like our RPGs," he says. "But it really, at its heart, is a narrative adventure story."

And he's also adverse to the comparison with another narrative detective story, Disco Elysium.

"We never set out to make a game that's like Disco Elysium," Sawyer says. "Structurally, it is much more similar to a game like Night In The Woods or Mutazione. I think our dialogue is pretty good, but it simply is not structured and developed the way that Disco is. Obviously, the viewpoint is very different. But the whole focus of the game is just not the same. So yeah, please don't hold us to that standard."

We spoke to Josh Sawyer at length about the development of Pentiment, and you can find our interview here. And he's not the only person at Obsidian we spoke to. We also chatted with Adam Brenneke about Grounded as it approaches its full 1.0 launch, and we spoke to studio head Feargus Urquhart about Obsidian's relationship with Xbox and the future of Obsidian -- stay tuned for our interview in the coming days.

https://www.ign.com/articles/what-is-obsidian-pentiment

What Is Obsidian’s Pentiment?
We spoke to Josh Sawyer about his decades-old ideas for Pentiment, and how he finally brought this medieval mystery to fruition.

Josh Sawyer’s just-announced medieval narrative mystery, Pentiment, has been in development for about four years now. But if you ask Sawyer, it really started way, way back in 1992.

At the time, Sawyer was enjoying an RPG called Darklands, developed by Microprose Labs for MS-DOS. It was set in the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century, but with a supernatural bent that left room for demons and Templar conspiracies. Sawyer fell in love with its approach to historical fiction, and as he went on to get a degree in history and subsequently work in games, the idea of a historical fiction game stuck with him.

Sawyer first pitched the seed of what would become Pentiment to now-Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart back when they were still working at Black Isle together. There, Sawyer was a designer working on projects like Icewind Dale 2 and the original, cancelled Fallout 3. As Sawyer explains it, Urquhart was “not into” his pitch at the time, and felt people who wouldn’t know history wouldn’t want to play it.

But Sawyer disagreed, and the idea came up once more years later when the two were reunited at Obsidian Entertainment, where Sawyer was the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, and the director on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. During the lull after Deadfire, while discussions about a Microsoft acquisition were floating around, Sawyer revived his old pitch as a narrative adventure game. It was not quite a murder mystery, but with mystery elements, with a strong visual style and gameplay, like Night in the Woods, Mutazione, or Oxenfree. It would incorporate exploring, talking to people, and little puzzles sprinkled throughout. Sawyer knew what he pitched would be niche, so he wanted a fairly small team and didn’t want to do anything too mechanically complex.

This time, his pitch won out, and Sawyer got to work on Pentiment: a 16th-century narrative adventure set in Upper Bavaria. As he explains it, you play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman on the cusp of becoming a master artist who’s traveling around Europe, taking on odd jobs as he goes. While staying at a Benedictine abbey and working on an illuminated manuscript, his friend and mentor is accused of the murder of a prominent individual. His friend claims innocence, but no one seems especially interested in investigating who the real murderer is. That leaves Andreas to step up to the job, becoming a medieval detective of sorts as he speaks to the many suspects.

“One of the key things in the game is that we do not ever definitively tell you, canonically, [who] the murderer [is],” Sawyer explains. “You have to investigate, find as much evidence as you can. You make your decisions based on whatever you think is most important. You are basically deciding who's going to pay for the crime. That can be the person that you think actually did it. That can be the person that you think should be punished, whether or not they did it. Maybe it's the person you like least. Maybe it's the person you think that the community will miss the least.”

But the scenario Sawyer describes is just the beginning of Pentiment. In total it covers a span of about 25 years, during which multiple crimes, murders and conspiracies occur that Andreas gets roped into somehow or another. But despite the detective story bent of Sawyer’s explanation, he’s averse to calling Pentiment a detective game, because he says it’s light on detective game mechanics. It’s a narrative adventure, he says, with mystery and murder elements, and where choices have consequences. For instance, Andreas is an artist with a university education, but players can choose what he excelled at in school. That choice will dictate the kinds of conversations he’s able to have with others as he tries to find information about various crimes.

Aside from its narrative, one of Pentiment’s core elements is one that immediately stands out in its trailer: the art. Sawyer says without art director Hannah Kennedy’s ideas and execution for the style, Pentiment may never have even existed. In fact, for a time early on in the project, Pentiment was mostly just the two of them. “I really believe that if I had gone to Hannah and said, ‘Hannah, I have this idea for this style,’ and she either wasn't interested, or just [couldn’t make it work], I would’ve dropped it. I wouldn’t have done it,” Sawyer says.

His pitch to Kennedy was a pretty specific and strange one: Sawyer wanted to mix late medieval manuscripts with woodcuts and engravings and early print, to better show off the transitory period between late medieval and early modern art. And Kennedy delivered.

“One of the things that I think is really great about her is that she is very good at critically analyzing how a piece of art is put together in terms of line weight and color, where colors go and where they don't, where blacks go and where they don't, when ink is used rather than paint, and things like that,” Sawyer says. “So she was able to deconstruct a lot of these images that we were looking at for reference, and then reconstruct a style guide so that she and the other artists on our team were able to synthesize this new style, which I just think is really compelling.”

For some, medieval manuscripts might be a bit daunting to look at, with their stylistic font choices. Sawyer reassures that accessibility was taken into account with an easy font mode, which he says was made possible in part due to Xbox’s support and interest in the project and access to its accessibility teams. In fact, the Xbox acquisition of Obsidian in 2018 brought a number of benefits to Pentiment specifically, and Sawyer says he had always conceived of it as an ideal GamePass game.

“I think that Microsoft and Xbox have access to a lot of accessibility,” he says. “Their accessibility labs are extremely helpful. “This game is not really supposed to be hard. … So having the accessibility labs to give the game to people who have different limitations than you or I might, it's really great to get feedback like, ‘This text is hard to read. We need better contrast. We need more options. We need text to speech.’ All sorts of things like that are extremely helpful to us. We normally wouldn't have access to those resources.

“Also, honestly, Microsoft's access to localization is really important. This game is very text heavy, [it’s] an Obsidian game. Especially when people play it not in English, the quality of the localization is going to make or break their experience.”

Sawyer says that while the setting and style are quite different, Pentiment explores a number of the same themes as his past work on New Vegas and both Pillars of Eternity games, in particular death, social transformation, and class conflict. Specifically, Sawyer says Pentiment examines these ideas by showing a broad, diverse portrait of medieval society and the numerous types of people who made it up.

“I wanted to show a wide spectrum of people in this community, which is why it's not just monks, but it's monks, the nuns that live in the house near them,” he says. “It's the peasantry, the crafts people, the smith, the miller who everyone hates because he's awful, as is often the case. I wanted to show the breadth of society and portray it as well as I could.”

While Sawyer is aware that Pentiment is a bit niche, with its deep exploration of medieval history, art, and culture, he feels that watching the trailer shown today at the Xbox Game Showcase is a pretty good benchmark to gauge whether or not an individual will like it. But he also says he wants to capture an audience interested in history or medieval art who may not necessarily be dedicated gamers or familiar with his past work. And his ultimate goal for Pentiment is for it to be, at least on some level, educational for anyone who picks it up.

“If people don't know anything about history, and they just like the look of it and the idea of it, I want them to play it and passively absorb knowledge as they go through it,” he says. “I want them to enjoy the story, be entertained by it, but also gain a greater understanding of how people lived in the 16th century.”
 

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