Interview Josh Sawyer Interview Roundup: On grognards, illiterates, and murdering dudes

[Monty]

OK. I just hope you realize that games that allow you to create such characters have typically nerfed the difficulty of enemy encounters in order to compensate for that possibility. If that's a tradeoff that you accept, then I got nothing.

How does this 'nerfing' apply in games with multiple difficulty settings, ie most of them?

And given Sawyer's recent pandering to casual players (guess he's got all the 'grognards' cash in the kickstarter so now has to appeal to the masses) are you expecting POE encounters to be very challenging on normal difficulty?

 

[Infinitron]

How does this 'nerfing' apply in games with multiple difficulty settings, ie most of them?

Difficulty settings in most games are bullshit, HP inflating stuff. They're not a substitute for truly punishing encounters.

And given Sawyer's recent pandering to casual players (guess he's got all the 'grognards' cash in the kickstarter so now has to appeal to the masses) are you expecting POE encounters to be very challenging on normal difficulty?

Yes.

 

[Monty]

And given Sawyer's recent pandering to casual players (guess he's got all the 'grognards' cash in the kickstarter so now has to appeal to the masses) are you expecting POE encounters to be very challenging on normal difficulty?

Yes.

So Sawyer says it will "not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range."

Ah, good. But I thought those games were 'nerfed' to compensate for the freedom to create non-optimised characters?

 

[Infinitron]

And given Sawyer's recent pandering to casual players (guess he's got all the 'grognards' cash in the kickstarter so now has to appeal to the masses) are you expecting POE encounters to be very challenging on normal difficulty?

Yes.

So Sawyer says it will "not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range."

Ah, good. But I thought those games were 'nerfed' to compensate for the freedom to create non-optimised characters?

Touche.

I suppose you could say that they were and they weren't. The battles could be extremely frustrating if you didn't have a well constructed party and didn't feel especially nerfed, but they dumped lots of consumables + endless resting on you to compensate. I wasn't thinking about those games in particular when I said that, though.

 

[deuxhero]

By what Sawyer says, PoE should do the following (order may vary slightly).

1: Explain all racial abilities in mechanical terms (done in NWN2)
2: Explain what each attribute does mechanically on the damn stats screen (as mentioned before, Baldur's Gate doesn't do this and recommends things that are outright wrong) and give their exact increases by point (NWN2 does half this. It explains what everything does, but not at what rate. It's pretty much all at a +1 for every +1 in the stats, but would be nice to have there)
3: Explain what each class does and tell the players about EVERY potential ability they can pick in the future (done by NWN2 fine)
4: Explain what each skill does mechanically (NWN2 is fine here)
5: Explain what each potential feat (or whatever they are calling them in PoE) does and what is needed to qualify for it at character creation (NWN2 does NOT do this, not even in the manual. The Fallout series lets you see perks you don't qualify for, but not at character creation). It is key to let a player know so he can start towards qualifying things he wants ASAP (note that NWN2 does tell you prestige class requirements, though that's less than helpful if you don't know, for example, Combat Expertise requires 13 int and you'll never be a weapon master without it)

All of it is pretty reasonable and, aside from the utterly massive misstep with feats, Sawyer followed it all in NWN2 .


Such information WILL lead a player to find things they can "exploit": for example someone might see that 2nd level paladins add their charisma to their saves and that sorcerers use a high charisma and decide to multiclass the 2 for a Sorcerer who can make pretty much any saving throw he wants, but this isn't a bad thing. If a player reads everything and finds something that works, he should be allowed the advantages.

 

[Cadmus]

Man, why does Josh Sawyer seem like such a boring asshole hipster? I've watched some of the videos of him talking and he is so irritating. He practically makes me not care about this game.

 

[Shadenuat]

Josh never came to peace with himself for his thief constantly getting gibbed by BG2 GIMPED CLASS HARDCOUNTERS, which he reminds us grognards in every interview, and will forever, until we see his point and his game will make us aknowledge that our fun is not fun and we are just a bunch of masochists. We just have to accept the challenge and wait.

 

[jiujitsu]

I remember the first few times I played BG 1/2 I'd spend an hour rerolling stats. I also remember enjoying the music on the creation screen and having fun clicking again and again trying to roll 18/00. Does that make me a Grognard?

 

[Monty]

I remember the first few times I played BG 1/2 I'd spend an hour rerolling stats. I also remember enjoying the music on the creation screen and having fun clicking again and again trying to roll 18/00. Does that make me a Grognard?

It makes you a Grognard with extra points in Autism...



(like me )

 

[Infinitron]

I remember the first few times I played BG 1/2 I'd spend an hour rerolling stats. I also remember enjoying the music on the creation screen and having fun clicking again and again trying to roll 18/00. Does that make me a Grognard?

It makes you a Grognard with extra points in Autism...



(like me )

If I ever play Baldur's Gate again, what I plan to do is cheat to simulate a point buy system and create a character with the average expected number of stat points: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...system-in-ad-d-infinity-engine-chargen.77384/

 

[Monty]

If I ever play Baldur's Gate again, what I plan to do is cheat to simulate a point buy system and create a character with the average expected amount of stat points: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...system-in-ad-d-infinity-engine-chargen.77384/

Yes, that sounds about right. I actually only worried about stats on my first playthrough, after that I had quite a lot of fun playing with characters where I just accepted the first roll (obviously redistributing points to prime attributes where necessary). I found it more interesting than playing with characters strong in every area.

And quite satisfying when you do get girdles / gauntlets to pump them up a bit, instead of just increasing strength from 18(57) to 18(00) etc.

Although this whole discussion is obviously more relevant to Icewind Dale as you only create one character in BG usually.

 

[Lhynn]

In a way what hes doing is making it easy on people that dont have time to play or dont want to put any effort into learning how to play an "old school rpg". Hes making a game for us in a sense, its not about challenge it seems (because it was promised that PoE will have plenty of that) but simply that the systems will be so easy to understand with minimal time investment that you can jump right into the game and play it without fear? of fucking up your build and having a character thats gimped.

It sounds strange on paper, it doesnt matter how you decide to build your character, it will have roughly the same impact on your game, but it will give you different tactical choices in the actual fight, so in the big picture it will be a meaningless choice, but in each individual encounter there will be a difference on how it plays out.

Did i get it right?

 

[set]

In principal he's not wrong about what he says - cRPGs should be open about their mechanics at character generation - or, if they're going to invite player exploration and discovery, the game should be designed to facilitate restarts. Like, I don't mind a game like Dwarf Fortress is inscrutible in its mechanics a lot of the time, because when I die I just start over. Same goes with Diablo or Path of Exile or any roguelike. I like feeling challenged and when I fail starting over feels good, a fresh start to make things right. Every failure means I learned something new about the game and that's invigorating. It's good these games have a lot of procedural content so nothing is ever "quite the same".

But if you're going to cram your game with cutscenes and dialogue (and make it linear) to slow everything down you should be up front about decisions players can choose to make.

In regards to combat encounters, there should probably be more than one path to victory, maybe even more than one optimal path, but if there are no "wrong paths" then finding the right one isn't very interesting or challenging. Persona/SMT games come to mind here -- some bosses are batshit stupid in these games with their immunities and what not, but they at least present an interesting puzzle to solve. If "any party" or "any character build" is "good enough" to beat the game with, then we didn't demand much from our players, did we?

 

[Volourn]

"So Sawyer says it will "not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range."

Except IWD2 is easier than both of those other games. LMFAO

 

[fanta]

After a day's adventuring you rest for the evening in the common room of the Sleeping Troll. Buxom tavern wenches make sure the beer does not dry up. The rumbling laughter of your companions makes the table shake. You see a solitary figure in the corner set aside his glass of water and approach you. He begins in a thin, bat-like voice: "You can't be having fun here, of all places. Nobody could. And certainly not drinking THIS thing" -- he points to your overflowing mug. You...

... momentarily wipe away the smile from your face, cut off mid-joke and start whining about the food and beverages. This man cannot be wrong.
... if this merriment is all an illusion, what is the cause? Wait, earlier today you were exploring some ruins and recall seeing a patch of coloured moss there. Couldn't this illusion of happiness be one of its hitherto unknown toxic effects? Yes, this explains it perfectly. You reach to your backpack for a Cure Poison potion.
... tell the humourless busybody to get lost.

 

[crawlkill]

you really do kill a fuckton of sapient beings in video games. it's kind of creepy.

there's fun to be had in beating a system that's shitty and broken like old-school D&D, but I don't think that fun is worth turning off a mainstream audience that won't bother finding it. as long as every fight doesn't require thirty seconds of prebuffs, I'll be a happy gay.

 

[J_C]

"So Sawyer says it will "not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range."

Except IWD2 is easier than both of those other games. LMFAO

What are you talking about? Vanilla IWD is much easier than IWD2, and even BG2.

 

[Zeriel]

Magical power is tied to your soul energy not intellect.

Meanwhile, my soul hate is tied to Josh Sawyer.

 

[crawlkill]

"So Sawyer says it will "not be as hard as IWD2 but should be in the IWD/BG2 range."

Except IWD2 is easier than both of those other games. LMFAO

What are you talking about? Vanilla IWD is much easier than IWD2, and even BG2.

When were any IE games ever legitimately difficult past the initial "killed by a gibberling in one hit" phase?

 

[Brotherman Bill]

“There are people that’ll say to me ‘oh man, it’s fun to do that’, but no. No, it’s not.”
​

​

The essence of Sawyer, Sawyer hath spoken.

Amusing how codex goes from being tounge in cheek, to the point, not caring about offending anyone

...

To becoming butthurt primadonnas whenever Sawyer says anything. It hurts you because it's true, grogtards.

 

[Grunker]

I for one am glad we finally have an lead rpg designer whose main interest seems to be gameplay. He has some retarded opinions (bg2 was difficult durr we should cater to people who didn't buy equipment at pomab's deeerrrp) and a lot of cool ones (documentation is alpha-omega, everything tied to the gameplay needs to be meaningful, we need complex encounters that require different tactics and we need to test those, lots moar), but what's really interesting here is Codexers competing with each other to misinterpret him. Dude says enough controversial shit that it shouldn't be necessary to warp every word in order to display new forms of Sawyer-butthurt.

At least he managed to put a spotlight on the fact that many Codexers don't give a fuck about broken gameplay.

It also can't be a bad thing that most of the people who are all "omg poe looks like shit glad i didn't back/i regret backing" hate the Infinity Engine games.

The problem with everything Sawyer says is that he talks in absolutes all the time. Because of that it's actually hard to decide whether he really wants to end fun on the whole or just partially. Also, it makes me him look like a fucking dweeb (which he probably is).

Yeah, I agree. Sawyer is like Roguey-lite in the retarded way. Every time I read about his opinions on P&P games I facepalm due to the absolutism. Rather have that than some pussy-PR speech though. If nothing else, you always know what Sawyer thinks, and thus he spawns debate. I can't think of the last time someone in his position spawned much interesting debate. Devs usually just try as hard as they can to make everyone nod along while they say nothing.

He ain't a crowd pleaser, and while he's too black n' white, it ain't all bad.

Also, not sure autists designing RPGs is necessarily a bad thing

Around 90% of the games I backed on Kickstarter look disappointing in some way or another. Smears of shit stain 'em. Pillars of Eternity is certainly in the last 10%. A designer who gives a fuck, promising screenshots and LOTS, LOTS and LOTS of talk about mechanics, gameplay and systemic depth. I may not agree on everything, but the shit PoE shows me so far is way more promising than any other Kickstarter.

“There are people that’ll say to me ‘oh man, it’s fun to do that’, but no. No, it’s not.”
​

​

The essence of Sawyer, Sawyer hath spoken.

Amusing how codex goes from being tounge in cheek, to the point, not caring about offending anyone

...

To becoming butthurt primadonnas whenever Sawyer says anything. It hurts you because it's true, grogtards.

a-fucking-men, nigga

 

[Decado]

I've learned to ignore all developers -- everywhere, always and forever -- when they start talking about difficulty. Because Sawyer is right about one thing: there are plenty of people making games who plain old fucking suck at them.

 

[80Maxwell08]

I think Sawyer's problem here is he's outright saying people don't know how to have fun. That he knows fun better than them and if there's one attitude I hate it's the "I know better than you" attitude.

 

[Decado]

He can cop any attitude he wants if he can deliver.

Also, I think people are reading too much into his statement. It was an interview. Everything he said was his opinion. If he had said "In my opinion that is not fun" would people be so goddamn upset?

 

[set]

Yes because he is a designer of the game and what he finds fun will determine how the game plays. If Sawyer is designing a game he himself does not find fun how can he possibly design such a game well?