Incline Josh Sawyer appreciation station

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Who's the milf?

Looks like Paris Hilton.

 

[Roguey]

Who's the milf, and why is she under an Orthodox icon? And what is an Orthodox icon doing in his office?

I assumed it was his old gf Erica though I don't ever remember her being blonde.

 

[Outlander]

What's up with that cane behind the guitar... Is that the ultimate hipster trend? Walk around with a curly mustache, pocket watch and a cane?

 

[Alienman]

Going by the progression of his tweets, I'm expecting to see him on the barricades next, throwing molotovs wearing a black ski-mask.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Tiny desks in tiny offices. Just looking at these pics makes me claustrophobic. I'd have figured that he'd have a significantly larger work space given his prominence in the company. Unless he has a significant amount of space that isn't implied by his tiny desk, his offices are glorified cubicles.

 

[Humbaba]

Is his real name Sojerović or what's he doing with orthodox Mary up on his wall???

 

[ferratilis]

I'm reading some old Codex articles, and stumbled on this interview with Josh from 2002. It seems he always had a problem with self-loathing, constantly unhappy with what he does, but unable to improve on what he considers "failure." Remember that PoE GDC talk? It had similar apologetic tone.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=24

When I first started working at Interplay, my goal was always to move over to development, climb up the ranks, and work on Fallout 3. Though I had played RPGs and CRPGs all my life, Fallout was the first RPG since the original Pool of Radiance to really kick me in the ass and excite me (Darklands was more of a slow burn). Well, as fate had it, I wound up working on the original Icewind Dale. I wasn't particularly thrilled with how my work on it came out but hey -- one step closer to Fallout 3, man. I then did some work on Heart of Winter, and that managed to actually be worse than my Icewind Dale stuff. Icewind Dale II came out better than I expected, but still, not exactly awe-inspiring. Along the way, I designed the magic sub-system for Torn, gave worthless spell/feat implementation feedback on Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and helped come up with some of the background story for Lionheart. All of this gave me a lot of time to think about the work I'm doing on our unannounced "Jefferson" project (which is not a Fallout title).

 

[MuffinBun]

Who's the milf, and why is she under an Orthodox icon? And what is an Orthodox icon doing in his office?

this is what a storyteller should be interested in:
1. religion, existential issues
2. babes
3. cool military equipment[cropped, unfortunately]

 

[Sardine Dev Poster]

I'm reading some old Codex articles, and stumbled on this interview with Josh from 2002. It seems he always had a problem with self-loathing, constantly unhappy with what he does, but unable to improve on what he considers "failure." Remember that PoE GDC talk? It had similar apologetic tone.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=24

When I first started working at Interplay, my goal was always to move over to development, climb up the ranks, and work on Fallout 3. Though I had played RPGs and CRPGs all my life, Fallout was the first RPG since the original Pool of Radiance to really kick me in the ass and excite me (Darklands was more of a slow burn). Well, as fate had it, I wound up working on the original Icewind Dale. I wasn't particularly thrilled with how my work on it came out but hey -- one step closer to Fallout 3, man. I then did some work on Heart of Winter, and that managed to actually be worse than my Icewind Dale stuff. Icewind Dale II came out better than I expected, but still, not exactly awe-inspiring. Along the way, I designed the magic sub-system for Torn, gave worthless spell/feat implementation feedback on Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, and helped come up with some of the background story for Lionheart. All of this gave me a lot of time to think about the work I'm doing on our unannounced "Jefferson" project (which is not a Fallout title).

It sounds like he has severe emotional issues.

Chris comes off vaguely as someone who partied and absolutely killed it back when the world was relatively normal, and a fun, optimistic place to be. A total brodude that was doing lines off of every secretary in the company's office butts neatly lined up together at his desk, patting his face like it owes him money, and reaching over to his keyboard, "hmm today I will write an extra family quest line in new reno for fallout 2" before shooing the overbearing wenches lest they repeat for the 'nth time that day, "Please Lord Chris, don't move a muscle, we just want to hand down your genes, please, oh please-" and the absolute Chadvellone barks at them "I am MCA! Just who the hell do you think I am?!?!?! Your cuck pussy retard husbands huuuh, huuhhh?! I have a god damn game to write, away with ye, my life's true calling beckons to return to it's service!"

On the other side of the wall in the next room is Josh Sawyer, aka "Soyer," aka, "Sawyer the Turmoiler," or aptly put "Just Josh crying again in the east wing closet." He is frantically impacting the keyboard with his noodley dinosaur arms all limp wristed, and despite working day and night cannot in fact, write something coherent, or lord have mercy, "balance" heart of winter. Josh is slobbering all over himself in ugly phlegm filled sobs, hiccuping because the benevolent and heartfelt Tim Kain whom he has a homosexual crush on, has frankly, got tired to say the least of Josh giving him scenarios written with his manifesto of self loathing and rage. An ugly pigmole hambeast secretary of a "woman" that Chris has not chosen to carry his powerful seed (the inspiration for the enemy of the same name by the way, Chris didn't forget a beast like that) shows up at the door and puts a cup of milk down. Ah, yes, soy, the downtrodden young Sawyer consumed. However unlike the games he designed for, he did not have a strength of 18/21 (or high Resolve, if you will) and dropped it with his shaky hands, all over the ground in a mixed mess of his own semen, tears, and now soy. The bawling only grew, long into the night as the pigmole comforted him with a look of pity rubbing his back...

As all things wound up closer to the current days of Kali Yuga, Chadvellone would become Chris Asselone, after finishing his magnum opus coming to terms with the banality of finite nature of existence: Embodying the "Nameless One" in Planescape Torment, and stepping down from his legacy... forever. The once crowded, passionate stampeding, under the share of design ideas, offices of Interplay vanished with everyone in it.

Except Josh who remains eternally stuck in the cycle of despair, recalling old memories and not in the slightest grateful for the times he had back in the office, and as far as he's concerned, he remains the very same person he was back then, only now he somehow managed to lift a smartphone up long enough to find that Twitter exists.

When will Josh ever learn...?

 

[Twiglard]

there is no fathomable reason to use 5 monitors

There is, if you need to look at a lots of graphs at once, such as network availability stats.

 

[Roguey]

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1561176125530705920

Game dev, spec. AAA game dev, is much harder / more complicated now than it was ~20 years ago. I’m making a small game now but I work w/ and talk to people making AA and AAA. It’s changed enormously. Can people stop talking out of their asses for a second on this dumb site lol

Making a AA game now is comparable to making a AAA game 10 years ago - and it’s *still* harder and more complicated.

If your contribution to the discussion is to disagree without recalling your own dev experience or the testimonials of other devs contradicting what I’m saying, contemplate if this is a) smart b) incredibly dumb.

rusty_shackleford looks like Sawyer disagrees with your take. A question that was asked but has not yet been answered is just why a AA game being made now is harder to make than a AAA game from ten years ago.

 

[Butter]

Note Soyer's complete lack of an argument. "Trust me bro, it's harder now." The games aren't more mechanically complex, their designs aren't more ingenious, their stories aren't more sophisticated. What, specifically, is responsible for games being "harder and more complicated" to make now?

 

[Brancaleone]

What, specifically, is responsible for games being "harder and more complicated" to make now?

Decline (of cognitive functioning)

 

[rusty_shackleford]

a AAA game from 10 years ago is *checks notes* GTA 5.
If you really believe the average AA garbage is more difficult to make than GTA 5, I have a bridge to sell you.

 

[Alienman]

Note Soyer's complete lack of an argument. "Trust me bro, it's harder now." The games aren't more mechanically complex, their designs aren't more ingenious, their stories aren't more sophisticated. What, specifically, is responsible for games being "harder and more complicated" to make now?

Hard to get anything done when you spend all the time simping for thots on twitter.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Games get more complicated to make while also getting shittier. These two facts are intrinsically linked.

There really is not much excuse however if Joscha Sauer fucks up a simple game like Pentiment.

 

[what am i doing]

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1561176125530705920

Game dev, spec. AAA game dev, is much harder / more complicated now than it was ~20 years ago. I’m making a small game now but I work w/ and talk to people making AA and AAA. It’s changed enormously. Can people stop talking out of their asses for a second on this dumb site lol

Making a AA game now is comparable to making a AAA game 10 years ago - and it’s *still* harder and more complicated.

If your contribution to the discussion is to disagree without recalling your own dev experience or the testimonials of other devs contradicting what I’m saying, contemplate if this is a) smart b) incredibly dumb.

rusty_shackleford looks like Sawyer disagrees with your take. A question that was asked but has not yet been answered is just why a AA game being made now is harder to make than a AAA game from ten years ago.

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

 

[Roguey]

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

It's true for AAA teams since dev team sizes have bloated to nearly or more than a thousand people but I don't understand how a game with a team that's a little less than or a little over a hundred people will now have a harder time than teams that had hundreds to manage.

 

[Infinitron]

I think that broadly speaking what's going on here is that the difference between releasing a product that's 95% polished and one that's 99% polished can be orders of magnitude more work in terms of grunt work, checklists, procedure, etc. While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

It's true for AAA teams since dev team sizes have bloated to nearly or more than a thousand people but I don't understand how a game with a team that's a little less than or a little over a hundred people will now have a harder time than teams that had hundreds to manage.

It's not just management, it's also engine bloat that requires increasingly more coders for maintaining an ever growing and useless feature set, loss of systemic coding know-how (C# high-level monkeys not knowing how to resolve lower-level issues), a ridiculously multi-layered art pipeline, writing ever more complicated shaders requiring different languages for every hardware vendor etc. It's a perfect invitation for more bugs (thus, more and more testing) and inefficiencies. Basically, productivity goes downhill due to over complexity.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think that broadly speaking what's going on here is that the difference between releasing a product that's 95% polished and one that's 99% polished can be orders of magnitude more work in terms of grunt work, checklists, procedure, etc. While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

What do you consider "bells and whistles"? Releases tend to be buggier now than before, especially so for any developer that targets consoles as console manufacturers have become lax in what they deem acceptable compared to their previous standards.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-costs-of-buggy-game-launches-are-mounting-opinion

Launching games in a somewhat unfinished state has essentially become standard industry practice in the years since consoles became capable of downloading day-one patches. Publishers have shaved days and weeks off already tight development timescales by making the lead time between "gone gold" and a game appearing on store shelves into a desperate, crunch-filled rush to fix outstanding issues - and platform holders have tacitly permitted and even encouraged this behavior by relaxing strict technical quality checks that would, in the era before patches, have seen the "gold" code for many modern games being rejected and sent back to be fixed.

Unless by "bells and whistles" you mean useless features like endless integration into dozens of different platforms that nobody wanted or needs but simply makes devs feel like they're accomplishing something.

In recent memory the only RPG studio that has managed to make a full RPG in a reasonable amount of time is Solasta's dev team. They created what was essentially the entirety of Solasta in the time it took for Obsidian to make DLC for Outer Worlds(kickstarter ended approximately the same date as Outer Worlds released, Solasta fully released shortly after Eridanos DLC for Outer Worlds.) Did you know Solasta actually released into early access months ahead of the estimated 'release date' on their kickstarter page and then proceeded to meet the estimated release date they set? By gamedev standards, that's a fucking christmas miracle.

 

[Infinitron]

By bells and whistles, I mean stuff like, for instance, recording entirely different bark sets for companions depending on their state (stealth, wounded, etc), each requiring multiple levels of sign-off from various leads. Exhaustive levels of detail compounded by the requirement to maintain top-down oversight.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

recording entirely different bark sets for companions depending on their state (stealth, wounded, etc)

While producing results that aren't materially better to hardcore gamers who have trained themselves to look past the bells and whistles anyway.

?

that's the kind of attention to detail I wish gamedevs had, where are you keeping these troves of games?

 

[fizzelopeguss]

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1561176125530705920

Game dev, spec. AAA game dev, is much harder / more complicated now than it was ~20 years ago. I’m making a small game now but I work w/ and talk to people making AA and AAA. It’s changed enormously. Can people stop talking out of their asses for a second on this dumb site lol

Making a AA game now is comparable to making a AAA game 10 years ago - and it’s *still* harder and more complicated.

If your contribution to the discussion is to disagree without recalling your own dev experience or the testimonials of other devs contradicting what I’m saying, contemplate if this is a) smart b) incredibly dumb.

rusty_shackleford looks like Sawyer disagrees with your take. A question that was asked but has not yet been answered is just why a AA game being made now is harder to make than a AAA game from ten years ago.

>better tools
>drastically lower expectations
>not stuck with pre-C++11 language
>somehow harder

Sawyer's a retard.

You can even outsource your art assets to chinks for dirt cheap.

 

[Twiglard]

How much is AA? Is Underrail AA? How about Age of Decadence?