Interview Interviews with Brian Heins and Josh Sawyer at USGamer

[Infinitron]

Tags: Brian Heins; J.E. Sawyer; Obsidian Entertainment; Pillars of Eternity; Pillars of Eternity: The White March; Tyranny

Obsidian's Brian Heins, project director on Tyranny, was interviewed in the latest episode of "Axe of the Blood God", USGamer's weekly RPG-centric podcast. At just over half an hour, the interview fleshes out some of the known details about Tyranny's story and premise, choice and consequence, companions, combat and character system. But it's most noteworthy for Brian's frank admission that the game aims to have more streamlined combat than Pillars of Eternity to attract a wider audience. Honesty is good, right? He does promise to make up for it with a more complex magic system, but still no details on that. A suitably Codexian summary of the interview is available here.

(starts at around 42:30)
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Coincidentally, Josh Sawyer was also a guest on this same podcast earlier this month for an hour-long Pillars of Eternity retrospective interview. He talks about the things he'd like to improve in a potential sequel (which increasingly seems like it's already in development), issues another mea culpa about the stronghold, and offers some general thoughts about the reception of oldschool RPGs such as Pillars among casual and hardcore audiences.

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A summary of the interview with Josh is available here. I think it's interesting that there a few things there that, in retrospect, seem like they're intended to preempt accusations of any future streamlining similar to Tyranny's.

 

[oldmanpaco]

Is the IOS version going to be available on launch? This feel like an IOS type of game.

 

[Trashos]

Yeah, what Josh says at 49:00 of Episode 46 is pretty scary. He more or less admits that we cannot count on these guys to do serious RPGs even now that old-school RPGs are in fashion, and even when they have just sold 700k copies with a small production budget.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Josh gave some good answers in that interview.

I facepalmed that the person hosting a podcast called 'Axe of the Blood God' (dumb name) didn't play a single western RPG until Dragon Age: Origins, but oh well. She gave a shout out to Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun so she does have some knowledge of the current state of the genre, at least.

I agree with Josh about tablets, too. Tablets have really good hardware now, there's no reason why they couldn't support RPGs like Pillars without compromising the game at all. I'll always be a PC gamer first, but it would be incredible to be able to play an Obsidian RPG on a train or a plane.

Moving on to the Tyranny interview now.

 

[m_s0]

I facepalmed that the person hosting a podcast called 'Axe of the Blood God' (dumb name) didn't play a single western RPG until Dragon Age: Origins, but oh well. She gave a shout out to Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun so she does have some knowledge of the current state of the genre, at least.

She is frustratingly ignorant about western crpgs, as are all people associated with US Gamer, I find. They just don't play them, or have started in recent years because of the old school kickstarter games boom. Basically, to cover the 'phenomenon' more than anything, is what my impression of their interest is. Kat's probably the worst offender here, though.

That's not even a stab, since they're clearly slanted towards jrpgs to a degree which I find bizarre, being raised on western rpgs, and are capable of discussing/analyzing jrpgs a lot better.

Point is, because of all of that, US Gamer is not a place I go looking for western rpg-related news/articles/interviews.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I facepalmed that the person hosting a podcast called 'Axe of the Blood God' (dumb name) didn't play a single western RPG until Dragon Age: Origins, but oh well. She gave a shout out to Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun so she does have some knowledge of the current state of the genre, at least.

She is frustratingly ignorant about western crpgs, as are all people associated with US Gamer, I find. They just don't play them, or have started in recent years because of the old school kickstarter games boom. Basically, to cover the 'phenomenon' more than anything, is what my impression of their interest is. Kat's probably the worst offender here, though.

That's not even a stab, since they're clearly slanted towards jrpgs to a degree which I find bizarre, being raised on western rpgs, and are capable of discussing/analyzing jrpgs a lot better.

Point is, because of all of that, US Gamer is not a place I go looking for western rpg-related news/articles/interviews.

I listened to the other interview with Brian Heins and she is even worse. Heins laughed politely at some of her more inane comments.

 

[Zed]

What a masculine voice the interviewer has. I mean... damn.

edit: lol can someone transcribe this shit there's no way I'm listening to this heap

 

[l3loodAngel]

Tablets have really good hardware now, there's no reason why they couldn't support RPGs like Pillars without compromising the game at all. I'll always be a PC gamer first, but it would be incredible to be able to play an Obsidian RPG on a train or a plane.

They had good hardware for a few years now. Hardware was never the issue, the issue is/was controls. Non twitch based RPGs in general require complex controls (mouse + keyboard), therefore, games made specifically for tablets are always dumbed down in comparison (i.e. Shadowrun) to non tablet games. But hey at least they are not lying anymore...

 

[AwesomeButton]

What a masculine voice the interviewer has. I mean... damn.

edit: lol can someone transcribe this shit there's no way I'm listening to this heap

Josh, how does it feel to be done with Pillars of Eternity after several years of development at this point?

Spoiler

It feels great, but I think that none of us really had realized until we are finished that we are actually finished! And we look back and we realized it had been over three years, coming up on three and a half years. So, it was an amazing experience, it was something we never thought we'd be able to do. And the community has been so helpful in obviously funding the game, but also providing feedback during the course of development, even after development. I mean, a lot of the features we put into the 3.0 patch were based on ongoing player feedback and beta feedback. So, overall this has been a great experience, and we're looking forward to doing some more stuff with the IP in the future.

A year ago, when I talked to you about Pillars of Eternity, this was right before it came out, you were kinda alluding to the fact that this game is so squarely in your wheelhouse, I mean, you guys have been making this kind of games for a good twenty years, like you were really pumped to be getting back to the isometric RPG mode. A year later, the game's out, you are done, do you still feel like this is so totally in your wheelhouse and you are so comfortable with it, has anything changed?

Spoiler

Yeah, I mean, I don't really think anything has changed. I mean, there are things that we want to improve about how we approach this type of game. There are certain things in our technology that we'd like to improve in the future, but I think that everyone on the team whether they were experienced with this type of game or they were new to this type of a... specifically the isometric RPG, party-based RPG, I think we all had a great time, we had to re-learn some things in the process, but you know, I think for us roleplaying is, a lot of it is about how you interact with the story, how you define who your character is as a person. I mean obviously there's things like stats and levels and equipment and stuff like that, but for us the roleplaying experience can take a lot of different forms, and on the PC in a game like this, we can really focus on the storytelling and the character development, and it's been really a lot of fun, so I think that everyone has really enjoyed the experience, and we want to keep doing it.

You relied on encounter powers and rest powers and that kind of thing, which kind of forced everybody to, I suppose, reserve their powers for like big moments. I know that there would be a lot of times where I would be like "Ok, I can deal with this enemy, like, using just level one magic, it's all good... oh that's a giant party, ok, time to throw a fireball or two, and see what's going on"...

Spoiler

That was certainly the intention.

So, a lot of the crux of the story is based around souls, and that kind of thing, and your main character has... I believe that the main character has souls from many different lifetimes, am I correct?

Spoiler

Well, it's more accurate to say that everyone sort of has some previous lives floating around somewhere, but in the case of your character in Pillars of Eternity, you become awakened, which means that one of your previous lives starts becoming part of your waking consciousness, and starts to interfere with your perception of reality. Most people never really are able to tap into or understand their previous lives, but your character is one of a small number of people in the world who can do this and that's what starts causing problems for him.

This was your opportunity to craft your own fantasy universe after working on established IPs for so long, like, it must have been like, kind of a real weight of responsibility, must have been kind of intimidating, but also liberating at the same time.

Spoiler

Yeah, it's a difficult balancing act, because we knew in making the sort of game that we were, which is a, you know, a nostalgia-driven project, that we realistically couldn't make something that was too bizarre. We had to make something that people feel like "yeah, this is in the tradition of Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate". And even Planescape: Torment, though it has like a lot of odd things in it, you know it still is a fantasy game, definitely. So, when we were developing the world we tried to strike this balance between having very traditional elements, and then things that were new, from our studio, or things we would like to emphasize, that aren't usually emphasized in a setting like the Forgotten Realms. And that was the approach we took with it, and I think that in the future, we don't want to just completely, radically leap away from that, but we want to explore more ideas within a fantasy setting. There's still a lot of room for new things, new ideas, that people haven't seen before.

You hear RPG developers who created their own IPs say a lot they've mapped out the history of the universe for a thousand years in either direction. Did you do something similar with Pillars of Eternity?

Spoiler

No... I actually have a degree in history, and so when I look at... I look at things in a way where I feel like there's a lot of information that we need to know, to understand how things developed over time, and usually what I try to do is, I look at how cultures have developed over time, and how I think that, you know these fictitious cultures would develop, you know given how we look at our own Earth history. And so it's not so much about defining every single moment and every single event. It's about establishing this network of, sort of, behaviors and activities and social changes, and thinking about how they would impact each other and how society will change based off of that. But as far as like, you know, are all of the emperors of the Aedyr empire mapped out for 20 generations? No, because it's not super important. It's important to understand that they are an empire and how that empire formed, it's important to understand that it's formed from humans and elves living in close proximity, so that they become culturally interwoven, in a way that demands certain cultural institutions like the haemneg, which is a ceremonial wedding. We don't have half-elves in this world but humans and elves sometimes fall in love and they can join in their society, but they can't be considered officially married, so they have this sort of second-class consortship. So it's thinking through things like that, that feel like "this would change how the society worked and how the people behaved", and things like that. Otherwise I try to leave that stuff open, so that in the future, if there is something more that we really need to... now it is important to figure out who the emperors going back ten generations were, then we can do that and not have to go like "Oh well, we put this down in a book, like five years ago, just haphazardly and now we are kind of bound by it for no reason". So our approach is to sort of fill in things as we need them, while maintaining a superstructure that allows the whole thing to sort of work together and make sense.

If you don't mind me putting on my history nerd hat, you are more of a believer in the trends and forces model than the great man model, in other words?

Spoiler

Definitely, yeah.

Looking back on the entirety of Pillars of Eternity, in retrospect, what do you think ended up working the best, and what aspect do you think could use more work for a potential sequel?

Spoiler

Usually what I cite is sort of the overall feeling, which sounds like a cop-out, but I mean, that's a really important thing. There are some players that would disagree, but I think for the most part the people who play the game, who are familiar with the Infinity Engine games felt like they were coming back to something they were very familiar with. From how the cursors looked, to the sort of very solid skeuomorphic graphic user interface that we had. The way that input worked, felt very similar to the old games, and it's something that we want people to drop into and feel like "Yeah, this is what I've been missing!". I think there were things that were... I think that the combat pacing could be adjusted quite a bit. It was difficult to find a balance between when you have very few party members and not a lot of actions, versus when you have six or more, with animal companions, and you have a ton of people doing a ton of things, it becomes very difficult to keep up with what's going on. I think something we'd like to work on in the future would be things like dynamic elements within scenes. I'm glad that people loved our 2D backgrounds, we put a lot of time and care into them, but I believe we can do more to make our environments feel more alive and more reactive to things like time of day and weather, and stuff like that, just making the world feel more alive I guess. I think also that we can do more with reactivity, this is something that Obsidian always strives for, so no matter how good we do, I think we always want to push the envelope of reactivity to player choices, having companions react more to what you do, to each other, to have factions react more to each other, to what they do. I think there's a lot of stuff that really goes toward role-playing options, choices that we can make even better. I think our team did a great job with Pillars, so I don't want to make it sound like I think there's a bunch of crummy stuff in there, but I definitely see a lot of room for improvement, as do the other designers.

I really like the narrative scenes that have this minimalist look and are like a "Choose your own adventure", and the results of your actions are based on your stats. I like that kind of interactive storytelling that you managed to put into the game. The other thing that kinda stood out for me is that - it doesn't look like a big world but as you play it you realize it's really dense, it feels like everybody you talk to has a quest, or something that they want you to do, and this is especially apparent in the core game. I'm not sure it's quite as apparent in the beginning of The White March, which I was playing over the weekend. I wanted you to speak to those elements...

Spoiler

The inspiration behind what we call scripted interactions which are the illustrated Choose Your Own Adventure sequences, was one of my favorite all-time games, which is Darklands, from 1992. That was a historical fantasy role-playing game, and they had these really cool pen and ink and watercolor-type washes that were really simple but they were very evocative, and accompanied by narrative text and you could do the same sort of things, you could use your character's skills, your potions, or you could pray to a saint to help you, and those were always really cool sequences. So, we wanted to evoke those and in the base game we didn't get as much mileage on them as we wanted to, so in the expansions... actually in the second part of the expansion we added, I think the second part of the expansion has more scripted interactions panels than the rest of the game combined. So, we recognized that people really liked them, and we really enjoyed doing them, and once we had the resources to really put a lot of time behind it, we did, and I think they feel really good, and that's another place that we see there is more that we could do to make those experiences more reactive, and easier to author, so I love those, and I think everyone on the team has really gone to love doing them too.

There is this scripted interaction panel on The White March Part One, where there's a fire and you're trying to rescue a couple of people. It does just a phenomenal job of capturing this feeling that you are in a house, with the smoke in your eyes, and fire everywhere, and you're not sure where to go, or what decisions you should be making, and you're feeling the tension of... you want to rescue somebody but you don't want to actually get trapped and killed... It was just a really terrific sequence that really brought me back being at the table with a really good game master that was describing an event to me.

Spoiler

Thanks, it's actually... that is probably the most complicated scripted interaction sequence that we have in Pillars of Eternity, there were so many different ways that it can go. That was one of the reasons when we looked at it we were like "Wow, this is such a cool sequence, I wish it were easier to author these", because there's so much branching. But ideally, I think giving the player a sense of tension there and, you know, I think the other thing that I really want to emphasize was - in scripted interactions it's also [important] the forecasting the pros and cons of taking certain choices. Because I think that whenever we ask players to make a decision, we want to give them enough information to go like "Huh, if I try to do this, this is probably gonna test my Constitution" or "If I try to do this, I'm probably gonna have to dodge, maybe that's my Dexterity and my reflexes. Who would be best at that?". So, I'm really glad that people enjoyed that sequence and other sequences we put in, but once we started authoring these really complex scripted interactions, we realized there were ways to do this even better.
And then the second part of what you said was about the density. I think that on the core game we struggled a little bit with trying to find the right balance of density. In Baldur's Gate I, a lot of people had commented, when you look at the exterior maps in Baldur's Gate, a lot of them are very sparsely populated, and so we dindn't want to have big empty maps. On the other hand you have something like Athkatla where if you go through, I think it's the Promenade, you're constantly tripping over quest companions [must have meant The Copper Coronet in the Slums], and so we tried to split the difference there. And I do think that in some places it feels a little too dense, there's a few too many quest givers in an area, and I think that when we moved on to The White March and Stalwart, we were a little more sensitive to that, we tried to space things out. So you have more characters to talk to just for the sake of talking to them, or if they were part of a quest, they weren't immediately part of a quest, and so the pacing feels a little bit better for those guys.

On the flip side it seems like one aspect of Pillars of Eternity that kind of got criticized a little bit was the Stronghold, and you said that that is actually an aspect you would like to improve upon for the sequel. From your perspective, what exactly about the Stronghold ended up not working as well as you would have liked?

Spoiler

Mostly that the Stronghold emphasized systemic things rather than content. During development we realized that we have the resources to do a Stronghold, there were technical complications to how we had it implemented, that proved difficult to deal with, and as we looked at the amount of content we needed to make, to make a game that felt like it had the volume of quests and dialogue and reactivity that we wanted, we realized we really didn't have the resources to make a lot of rich content to the Stronghold. We did have time to make a system for the Stronghold, and so we had the Prestige rating, the Security rating, and you had your little hirelings that could come and go, and we had the attacks that could be staged, and all that was relatively easy to author, and the burden was more on system design and programming, to actually implement that. But that's not that satisfying because when people think about the strongholds from a game like Baldur's Gate II, they think of the distinctive different strongholds and the content that is in those strongholds, and so for the patch 3.0 we decided to revisit that and we devoted some resources to revising the adventure system, which were those previously generic adventures that you had, so we put a lot of lore into those and unique items that have their own stories to them, and that felt, I think a lot better, and then we also wanted to give the feel like you really were the lord of Caed Nua, you were the lord of this castle. We give that through the dilemmas, so we had people that visit you and have problems, and you sit in your throne with your companions around you, and you decide the fate of whoever is appealing to you. You have a lot of different options for how to deal with that, so it ties back with the role playing. We also had this series of small quests about you defending your claim to Caed Nua. So I think really our error... I shouldn't say "our error", it was my choice, to emphasize systems over content was what resulted in such a negative feeling. And so, if we make a sequel and if we have strongholds, I think the way to go with that is more emphasis on having cool content than having it be system-driven.

I really liked the stronghold, but one of the things that surprised me was that it felt kind of empty. I suppose my own experience stems from games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, where you find this old ruin and as the game progresses the ruin evolves, and changes, and becomes better and better, and gets way more crowded, I think that's the main thing, there were so many more people in there.

Spoiler

There were a couple of technical reasons for that and there were also just logistical problems. Any sort of conversation is potentially complicated and requires someone to write those dialogues. If we want to load a bunch of characters there, especially if they are a bunch of different characters, we have to have little barks and stuff for them. Individually they're not very burdensome, but when you start to add up all the characters and all the reactivity you want to have with them, then it can become pretty daunting. The other issue is how we had to stack those characters, because we had stronghold attacks, and so there were potentially problems with having really a lot of characters loaded into a map at one time. And we realized that if we really started flooding this area with NPCs that are all padding around and doing their AI, this could get really messy for people running on low-end machines. And so we just decided to keep it relatively spartan which, again, was an unfortunate choice. We understand that people would rather see that be very rich and alive and reactive.

Switching over to the expansion, what was behind the original decision to split them into two parts?

Spoiler

The thinking there was very practical. We knew from our experience working on other expansion packs and DLCs that the attachment rate, meaning the percentage of people who will buy an expansion versus the base game, the potential attachment rate goes down pretty quickly after a few months. So we knew we were going to make a fairly big expansion, we're not making a little teeny DLC, so if we're doing that, that's going to take five or six months, that's way past when we want to get something out to people. So it did cost logistical nightmares for us unfortunately, but the decision was based off of that practical understanding that if we go five or six months without releasing something, then people are going to forget about it and stop paying attention. So we just tried to find a way to have one continuous story, one set of areas that all felt thematically connected, but split them into two parts. And so that was really the thinking behind it.

What are your thoughts on the criticism that the expansions are being back-loaded with a lot of the best stuff being reserved for Part II, and Part I just being part of a dungeon crawl?

Spoiler

I think that's reasonable. Like I said this causes logistical problems for us because it's difficult to conceive of these things in two parts as of being one continuos whole. Since we were trying to build toward a big climax at the end of the second part, it was difficult to try to find the right emotional peak for the end of the first part. So I can see that people could say that it feels like "Oh..", and it was much grander at the end, once you find that all these huge supernatural forces are involved, I think the stakes become a lot more interesting. Especially when you get the visions at the beginning of The White March Part II, it becomes much more obvious that there is something really bad going on. So, I think that's a fair criticism.

Would you split it again?

Spoiler

I don't know. I think if you just said "Hey, it doesn't really matter, timeline-wise, when it comes up", then no. If it didn't really matter sales-wise or review-wise, or how people received it, when it came out, then no, I wouldn't split it, because it does make it logistically a lot more complicated for us. For the area designers, for production, it makes it more difficult for QA, more difficult for the narrative designers who are trying to write story beats and quests and things around this split in the middle of the expansion. But like I said, I've seen the numbers myself, on various games, and it is true that the attention really can drop off very quickly. So we made the choice and this is how it wound up, and I am glad. I am very proud of the team and what they did on the second part of the expansion, because I think the response from the community has been very positive. So even though splitting it caused some problems, I'm glad that in the end people seem to enjoy the experience overall.

In patch 3.0 you introduced Story Time mode. Could you speak a little bit towards the thought process in introducing this new mode?

Spoiler

When we did the Kickstarter a lot of our optional modes were geared around increasingly difficult modes. We have the regular difficulty mode, then we have Path of The Damned, which is sort of overload, and then we have Expert mode that turns off a lot of the helper features, we have Trial of Iron. So we already had a big focus on making the game more challenging. And in the patches, in the 2.0 to 3.0 range, we had put a focus on more hard counters in certain circumstances, or at least the option of some hard counters - creatures with immunities, creatures that had affliction immunities or damage immunities, just sort of force the player's hand into adapting a little bit more. After all that we figured we had continuously tried to ramp up the difficulty of the game, and we knew there were a lot of people who, whether it was that they were not experienced with this type of game, they were just not very good at this type of game, or they don't really care about the combat that much, they were still having a lot of difficulty, even on Easy difficulty, with all the helper features turned on. So, we talked internally about how complex it would be to make something like story time mode, and it turned out to be a couple of days of work maybe, it wasn't really that hard. And we figured that there would be a lot of people that would say "I tried playing this before and it was really difficult, and I never got the hang of it...", and hopefully there are improvements that we made over time that make it easier to play the game in terms of feedback, but if people just want to go through the story, and they want to have a big adventure, then Story Time mode is for those people. We do want our hardcore fans to feel challenged and it's very difficult to find ways to really challenge some of these players, because a lot of them are extremely, extremely good. But there's a big spectrum of people who want to play this type of game, so Story Time, or as a lot of people on Twitter called it, "Dad mode" seems to, you know, there's definitely an audience for it.

This is a trend in general in RPGs. Just the other day I wrote an article about how people should be willing to tackle Fire Emblem: Fates' "Classic" mode, which has the permadeath and everything, because Intelligent Systems introduced Casual mode, and surprise-surprise, the series suddenly became a lot less intimidating for a lot of people. A lot of people seem to prefer Casual mode, which disables permanent death. Is this a function of the fact that gaming in general has become a lot broader, and is appealing to a broader swath of people. So RPG developers, which is a traditionally hardcore genre, are just trying to reach out and get as many people as possible in this much broader environment.

Spoiler

I think that's part of it. I will say though that I think that maybe in the past five or six years, I've seen a lot of games that really, really emphasized the ease of play at the cost of the hardcore play. Personally, I feel like the heart of RPGs is something that is more of the hardcore, kind of serious thing, and so I personally would never want to... I wouldn't say "never", it would really have to depend on the specific property being used, but for something like South Park, I don't think it needs to be a hardcore RPG. But something like Pillars, I feel that at its heart it needs to be crunchy, it needs to really make people get down and think about it, at its heart, but allowing people to play it in a more approachable way I think is good, because, you know there might be that there are newer players or more casual players, people who are new to the genre. When people call it "Dad mode", it's not that they are a dad playing RPGs, it's like "I'm a dad", like "I don't have time to spend half an hour in a fight because I'm pausing every ten frames as another action cues off". Because some of the fights in the Infinity Engine games and some of the fights in Pillars of Eternity, really even though they are real-time with pause, you are really microing your characters to a very high degree, and there are people who are just like "Man, I'm tired... I gotta go to bed at ten, and get up and take my kids to school", or whatever. So I think it's just recognizing that there are people have their personal lives that are important to them, but they want to enjoy these games as well. If we can do that in a way that does not make the spirit of the game feel worse, then I think we should support it.

It's interesting trying to square the fact that Pillars of Eternity at its heart is a nostalgia project, it's appealing to a group of fans who have been playing these games for twenty years at this point, and you are introducing stuff that is very much meant for a broader audience. It seems like in some ways those were in conflict with one another because it seems like a lot of people who did not grow up with these games are actively intimidated by a game like Pillars of Eternity, and are kind of afraid to approach it even if you put in these casual features.

Spoiler

I think if someone is just really put off by the whole vibe of it... I don't think a game should be made to necessarily appeal to everyone, I certainly don't think that RPGs need to be made to appeal to everyone, but I do think that... What I've often said in the past is that if you have someone who really likes the idea of the game, the look of the game, the style of the game, if you can support them being able to play the game in a way that doesn't detract from how other people play the game, then do that. I think that developers can run into problems where they are trying to appeal to people that inherently don't like what you're doing. So, for example in Pillars, you gotta like some reading, there's just going to be reading in the game. You don't have to read every single word of dialogue, you don't have to read every single lore book, but if you just don't like reading, Pillars of Eternity is not a game that you're going to like, and we're not going to bend over backwards to make the "no reading" version of the game. Because those people, just inherently there's so much of the game they are not going to enjoy anyway, whereas with combat, I think a lot of people are like "I like the idea of this, I like the high fantasy elements, I like the look and the feel of it, I'm just bad at it". So that's where we are like... Well, like I said, it was not a lot of work to implement this mode, especially after implementing all of the super hardcore stuff. So given that, it just seemed like: this is easy, it doesn't make the game any worse for the people that like a bigger challenge, it just makes it easier for the people that are having a hard time, where they just want to relax, they don't want to be stressed out about it.

For me personally, I did not grow up with this kind of games, I grew up playing Final Fantasy and that kind of games, and I really never got into western RPGs until 2009-2010, a lot of that was to do with work where I really had to start to understand this totally other side of RPGs that I didn't really have a lot of experience with, and I ended up starting to play Dragon Age: Origins, and I remember friends of mine who had grown up with these games saying "Eh, Dragon Age: Origins is great but man, you need those six party members". And for me, playing a game like Pillars of Eternity was sort of a step up if you could say, a game like Dragon Age: Origins is the introductory, and the Pillars of Eternity and Shadowrun and Wasteland 2 are kind of the "Ok, you've taken a first step into a larger world, now you're moving on up". Is that the end impression that you share?

Spoiler

I think it's very interesting that six party members has become, not in every single IP for western RPGs, but... Personally, I think that six party members in the Infinity Engine games and in Pillars of Eternity can become pretty unwieldy, it can make the combat feel really difficult to manage and track, but yeah, there are a lot of people that think "No, six is it!", and I think a lot of the nostalgia for the game, you know people will look at certain things, and whether consciously or subconsciously, they favor the stuff that was the way it was before. So, six party members, six attributes, classes are named the way they were named and behave the way they have behaved, and it's always been a difficult balancing act for us to find something that doesn't violate that nostalgia in a way that makes people go like "Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing, this is not right, this doesn't feel right", but not being slavishly devoted to tradition, which can be a difficult process, but I guess one thing with Pillars versus Dragon Age: Origins is that we knew we were going to be a PC-only game, and there are certain interface problems that you can have on a console that you don't have on PC. Like managing a lot of characters can be a lot more difficult on a console, certain interfaces can just be really difficult to manage on a console but not that difficult to manage on a PC where there is a huge resolution. So, we knew were making something on a platform that is, more or less just inherently, the audience is more hardcore, and we didn't have a lot of limitations that, if you're making a cross-platform RPG, you might also have. And we made it just... You know it's a strange thing to say that four million dollars is a small budget, it's a relatively small budget, and so we can afford to be a little more niche, and a little more focused on the hardcore market.

I was going to say that I personally am a bigger fan of having more party members, because when you shrink it down to four, you start getting in a situation where you have to be like "Well, I have to have a magic user, ok, well, and I have to have a healer, so that basically takes half my party", and I start to lose a lot of flexibility. I just like to have as many options as possible when I'm building up my team.

Spoiler

I think that's a very good point, and something that... I don't think we were entirely successful with, but something that we tried to do with the Pillars of Eternity class design is to move away from this necessity of a nuclear party. You know, needing to have, like, "I gotta have a fighter, because fighters are the only guys that can dish out damage and take damage", "I gotta have a rogue, because rogues are the only characters that can pick locks and find traps and remove traps", "I gotta have a cleric, because clerics are the only characters that have reasonably good healing spells", "and I gotta have a wizard, because these are the only characters that have good crowd control", so with Pillars we tried to move away from that and separate some of those things out, so for example skills, like picking locks and finding traps - rogues are better at it, but you absolutely do not need a rogue. There wasn't even a rogue NPC in the base game. You could either make a rogue yourself, or you could just emphasize those skills with the character that you've built. We also tried to give the player many more options for healing, the reason that we have the endurance and health split pools system is so that when the fight ends, there is a long-term consequence for getting smacked around, but everyone goes back to full endurance, so that you can keep fighting, you don't have to sit down there and be like "oh yeah, I need a cleric because if I get wounded I need to heal all these guys right now, or I'm gonna die in the next fight". So, we tried to do stuff like that to encourage people, you know, because the other thing to it is that a lot of the players' choices about companions are based off of just how they feel about them. So if you don't like Eder, then you don't have to have Eder. If you don't like Durance, you don't have to have Durance. And there are certain things that those characters and those classes do that are very valuable, and they are very distinctive, but you know, trying to move away from this strict necessity like "you gotta have a nuclear party and after you have a nuclear party, slots five and six are your optional slots". I'd rather say "pretty much all slots are for whatever you want to put in there", and there would be certain drawbacks to doing that. One of my co-workers ran with a six-chanter party, and there were parts of the game where six chanters were incredibly powerful, and areas where they were incredibly weak and just getting killed all the time. He tried six priests, he tried wizards, you can try all sorts of weird parties, which is something we really wanted to encourage. That was a big focus for us, trying to ensure that the classes felt good, but they didn't feel like you absolutely, strictly needed to have the traditional D&D style nuclear party.

I felt like the classes generally felt good, especially the spellcasters, the only class that wasn't really working for me was the Ranger. Just because I like to be able to mark enemies and having an animal companion is always nice, but when it came down to it they just weren't pulling their weight the same way as, well, pretty much everybody else.

Spoiler

Yeah, that was something that... in subsequent patches we improved rangers a lot, but at launch they had a lot of deficiencies, the animal companions didn't really improve over time, which was a big drawback, and a lot of their damage values weren't up to snuff, and so we did try to focus on returning them, and I still think they require a little bit of finesse to play, because you do really have to coordinate between the animal companion and the ranger to really get the synergistic bonuses. But when you do, they can be really tough, but I don't disagree that, especially at launch, and until we patch to about 2.04, that the animal companion felt like a liability in a lot of cases, and their damage output didn't really make up for it.

You said that you had no interest in bringing Pillars of Eternity to consoles, is that still the case?

Spoiler

A lot of people have asked about it, but I just know that based on the interface limitations that we have, that that would be very difficult. If you really think about the roots of Baldur's Gate, which was the first Infinity Engine game, that was born really of an RTS, Bioware was building an RTS and then they converted over to this real-time with pause role-playing game. And a lot of the underlying mechanics are very RTS-like. And RTSs are traditionally very mouse-and-keyboard driven, with a lot of different ways that you can input, you have to move very quickly, there's a lot of units to select, and you have to be very precise about selecting them, which is why you don't really see a ton of RTSs on consoles, or when you do, they take very radically unexpected forms like Pickmen. I mean, Pickmen is, that's an RTS, you're controlling these things in such a bizarre way compared to a mouse-and-keyboard, traditional RTS. So, given that, I've always thought it's a real struggle to adapt something that's so focused on a big party with a lot of abilities, with an isometric perspective, I think those are big, big challenges. If we figure out a way to do it, that would be super-cool, I've just always been very skeptical about making it feel good. But I do think that tablets tend to bridge that gap a little more easily, so when I see things like the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition on tablets, that's super cool, because the tablet, it's not quite the same as using a mouse and keyboard, but you get a lot of that fast response and fast selection that would be difficult with a console controller, on a tablet. So I think there are ways that we could see how it could work on other platforms are the ones that as soon as we start thinking about the implications, it's really daunting.

So, Pillars of Eternity was part of this, like, first wave of nostalgia RPGs, you could call it, I guess, that also included Wasteland 2, and Shadowrun, and there is a lot of promise going now with them, when they are being kickstarted, lots of like "Yes, these are old-school, hardcore, really in-depth", like "we're going to put everything that we always wanted to put into these games, it's going to be great". Now that the first wave of those kinds of RPGs are out, do you feel like they've lived up to their promise?

Spoiler

Yeah. Yeah, I do. I can see where people could criticize any of those, I can see people criticize Wasteland 2, criticize Pillars, criticize Shadowrun, but we all tried to make pretty genuine traditional experiences, and I think that regardless of the flaws that our games had, I think that we did what we set out to do, and I certainly believe that we can improve and make better games for people in the future, but I was really happy that especially the RPGs coming out really seem to be hitting the mark for what people wanted. I was very worried because it was such a huge burden for us to know that people have put so much money and so much passion just as fans and backers in this successful project, if you really fundamentally misstep, that's not only you disappointing all those people who backed your game and had passion in that, but it also harms faith in developers, it harms faith in crowdfunding, and so, it was very important to us that we did this the right way, and that we came out with something that was genuinely good, and that people enjoyed, that lived up to their expectations.

And for you guys, the margin for error is even smaller, just because these games are made for the hardcore fans, you're gonna have a lot harder time pulling in the people who didn't grow up with these games, don't have a lot of nostalgia for them, they're going to be the ones relying on word of mouth, so you must have been feeling like walking this tight rope of "Ok, we gotta make this game really great to make sure that it's a success, cause there's just not a lot of margin for error".

Spoiler

No, there's not a lot of margin for error, and there's a whole generation of role-playing gamers that come on to the scene post-the Infinity Engine games, so their understanding and their expectation of what a fantasy RPG is more influenced by Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, maybe it's more influenced by games like Skyrim, stuff like that, which wouldn't necessarily seem like it's compatible with an isometric RPG, but people just conflate their experiences and then project them onto what they are looking at. When I worked at Black Isle studios, at first I wasn't a developer, I was in the web department, I was a website designer and a forum moderator, and a lot of people that are on the Obsidian forums right now, who are our backers, they were active on the Black Isle forums back in the late 90s and early 2000s. So, all these folks have been around for a while, and you know, they have really high expectations, but I've seen a new generation of people who have come in, who are just as interested, just as excited, but their expectations are slightly different. So yeah, we're dealing with two generations of gamers, and we're also dealing with people who never played this sort of games, but the idea of fantasy RPG is cool, so maybe if they see something that looks neat, and they have a bunch of people recommend it, maybe they'll play it. So, that's probably like the least important group, but, it's worth saying that this game, and this series can't survive just on the super-duper hardcore fans. We could not have made this game without them, absolutely, but it has to keep going. If the future is going to support games of this type, then we have to find new blood, who is really jazzed about this style of gaming, while staying true to the spirit, because I think that's the important thing - we can change lots of little bits and pieces, but there's a point at which you've changed enough that the spirit of the game has changed, it doesn't really feel like it's done in the style, or the... I guess that just "spirit" is the right word, of the inspiration, and that's something we don't want to do. So, we want to continue to adapt and bring in new people, but we don't want to stray from our roots.

Well, I think you got a new convert in me, just because the things that I liked about Pillars of Eternity were kind of universal, I really liked the art, I thought that the battle system worked actually pretty well, I found the story mysterious and interesting, and I guess I've just developed an appreciation for a lot of different types of RPGs, so even if I didn't have that really nostalgic grounding, I felt like it stood on its own just as a good RPG in general, it didn't lean on that nostalgic element. And that's really kind of the key, isn't it - it's just being like "All right, these are the ingredients for a good RPG, we've made good RPGs in the past, let's go do it".

Spoiler

It's all about making a good game, and we do this sort of leveling check, where we go "Does this feel right, does this feel like" - again - "it's in the spirit"? If we've changed something, have we changed something too much, does it strike a wrong note. That's the thing, when you started up and you start going in, are you like "Man, this doesn't feel right at all", which I know is a very abstract thing and it's more kind of emotion- and reaction-based, but I mean that's a big part of playing games, this emotional response and your experience. So, we could have said "We just want to make an awesome RPG and it's going to be anything" but we didn't say that. We said "We are going to make a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games". So, hitting that right note while focusing on making the sort of RPGs that Obsidian really loves making was about finding that balance.

But at the same time it must have been pretty frustrating to be overshadowed by Witcher 3, which came out a month later and ended up just sucking all of the oxygen out of the RPG space for like six months.

Spoiler

Well, thanks for coming out a month later, I don't care! Ha-ha-ha!

But it's not fair, because Witcher 3, obviously it's being made for a triple-A audience, has way more resources at its disposal than you do, it's coming across PC and all of the consoles, and it's just going to naturally demand a lot more attention. I know that calling Pillars of Eternity "one of the most underrated games of 2015" at the end of our retrospective, because I felt like I was the only one talking about it. It's tough that these games are expected to compete on an even footing with a game like Witcher 3, even though honestly it can't.

Spoiler

Well, I think there's a couple of things that could be said about that. One is, I think the press and fans were very generous to us in terms of how the game was reviewed, how it was received. We were funded by Kickstarter, so it was already paid for, we made it, it was a small team working two and a half years, so that our expectations of sales and stuff like that were relatively modest. It didn't need to sell millions and millions of units to be successful. Also, Witcher 3 is an amazing game, and Witcher 2 was super cool, and the first Witcher was awesome, they are building on two games of great stuff. I saw that game years before it came out, and I knew it was going to be really impressive, and really awesome, and I knew they were putting tons of work into it. So, I mean, it's not frustrating being overshadowed by a game that is tremendously good. It would be frustrating being overshadowed by a game where I was "God, why does anyone like this", but I look at Witcher 3 and I say "This is a great game, it looks beautiful, it's awesome, it has high production values, it's the third game in the series", and like I said, Pillars of Eternity is the highest rated game that Obsidian has made, and we're really grateful that the press and backers responded as positively to it as they did. It is weird when you see individual gamers expecting them to compete in the same way because they are different budgets, different price points, there are some different expectations there. I think most players will recognize, what Pillars is trying to do, and it's not trying to do the things that Witcher 3 is trying to do, and they can coexist it's not an issue.

Alright, last question, Obsidian obviously was in kind of a tough place in 2012 after Stick of Truth but before Pillars of Eternity. Have things kind of stabilized a bit for you guys, and are you planning on mostly focusing on isometric RPGs and games like Pillars of Eternity, or are you going to try and spread out, and get back in the triple-A development?

Spoiler

Well, we're certainly way better than we were back when we did the Kickstarter. In that sense things are leaps and bounds better. The company is at the biggest it's ever been, I think we're over 200 employees now pretty easily. The majority of the company right now is working on Armored Warfare, which took me by surprise when it started working on it, but that's turned out to be very unlikely but very cool project for Obsidian to work on, but I think that if you were to ask Feargus, we love making traditional RPGs, I think there's a lot of cool stuff that comes with working in triple-A games, but for us it's about "what's the opportunity look like", "what's the IP", "what's the team size", you know, how many teams do we have going, there are a lot of certain questions to ask about that. But one thing that I think is really cool is that so many different avenues for gaming have opened up, that Obsidian, we've made console games, Armored Warfare is a PC tank MMO, which is crazy, I never thought we'd make an MMO period, much less a tank PvP MMO game. We're making PC/Linux/Mac isometric traditional games that we did 15 years ago, and we're working on the Pathfinder card game for tablets and stuff. And so, there are a lot of different team sizes that a company like Obsidian can support, and I think that the possibilities are actually a lot more open than they were five or six years ago. Five or six years ago it looked like - you are doing cross platform console development with big teams and that was pretty much it. And that's also when we saw a lot of companies going out of business and that was a scary time. Game developers have really cool jobs, and when things look good, they can be very rewarding, when things are going bad and the industry is in a downturn, they can be terrifying, it can be extremely unstable, it can be frustrating. I feel now that we are in a much better position than we have been in years.

Now you are in the position where you can make the RPGs that you want to support yourself, I mean, that alone is probably a huge improvement?

Spoiler

It is incredibly valuable to won an intellectual property. When you get right down to it, a company is the people who work for it, that you don't control, any of us could leave or take another job, or go somewhere. It's also the material things that we have, that's not worth that much. But then, beyond that, is the intellectual property that we develop and we own. In the past we've always either worked on other people's intellectual property, which can be satisfying in its own way but it's not ours to do stuff with, or we work on an intellectual property that becomes someone else's, like, we're making intellectual property for another company, that becomes theirs. So, yeah, with Pillars of Eternity this is our fist opportunity that we've had to develop an intellectual property that's ours to deal with as we see fit, which is we've come out with those short stories, we have the Pillars of Eternity card game The Eastern Reach that's coming out, that's a traditional tabletop game that we've worked with Zero Radius Games on. It's really cool to be able to take this in the direction that we want to take it in and not have to worry about "Well, it's not ours, we don't really get to decide what we want to do with it, or how we can change it", and things like that. For us it's about listening to the fans, seeing the things that they liked, that they didn't like, where they'd like to see the stories taken, where they'd like to see the gameplay taken, and then dreaming up what the next generation of games can be for those folks.

 

[Roguey]

There are some players that would disagree, but I think for the most part the people who play the game, who are familiar with the Infinity Engine games felt like they were coming back to something they were very familiar with.

Pillars of Eternity is the highest rated game that Obsidian has made

 

[Volrath]

tldr

Obsidian is dead jim.

 

[Fairfax]

Pillars of Eternity is the highest rated game that Obsidian has made

By "journalists".
According to Steam reviews:

1. South Park: 97%
2. FNV: 95%
3. PoE: 88%
4. KOTOR2: 87%
5. AP: 81%
6. DS3: 61%

NWN2 is no longer available there, but I doubt it'd be higher than KOTOR2. Probably just above AP.

 

[imweasel]

Pillars of Eternity is the highest rated game that Obsidian has made

No it isn't, you lying fucktard. Even The Stick of Truth has better (user) scores and was better received because it IS the better game.

I think for the most part the people who play the game, who are familiar with the Infinity Engine games felt like they were coming back to something they were very familiar with.

PoE felt like a really shitty half-assed clone. It is kind of like comparing Risen 2 to Gothic 2.

 

[Seaking4]

I'm guessing he was talking about this: http://www.metacritic.com/company/o...ons=games&num_items=30&sort_options=metascore

 

[Crescent Hawk]

The interviewer sounds like a girl.

 

[Mustawd]

Interviewer is awful.

 

[agris]

Anthony Davis

Roughly, how many people at OE are working on Armored Warfare?

 

[Anthony Davis]

Anthony Davis

Roughly, how many people at OE are working on Armored Warfare?

I don't know an exact number - but it's a lot - by far our biggest project ever.

 

[Infinitron]

Anthony Davis

Roughly, how many people at OE are working on Armored Warfare?

I don't know an exact number - but it's a lot - by far our biggest project ever.

Feargus has said 95 people in the past: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=9929

 

[Crescent Hawk]

I gave up on Armored Warfare, its too much WOT for me, not that wot was bad. Played thousands of games with friends. Its too much WOT2.0. More could be done.

 

[GrainWetski]

I agree with Josh about tablets, too. Tablets have really good hardware now, there's no reason why they couldn't support RPGs like Pillars without compromising the game at all. I'll always be a PC gamer first, but it would be incredible to be able to play an Obsidian RPG on a train or a plane.

Consoles have really good hardware now, there's no reason they couldn't support FPS like Quake 3 without compromising the game at all. I'll always be a PC gamer first, but it would be incredible to be able to play an id FPS on a couch.

Famous last words.