Development Info Josh Sawyer on the Road to Better Armor Systems

[Infinitron]

Tags: Fallout: New Vegas; Josh Sawyer; Obsidian Entertainment; Pillars of Eternity; Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

Following up on his 2020 presentation about reputation mechanics, Josh Sawyer was supposed to have given a talk about RPG armor systems last year. Somehow it took him until this week to finally get around to it, but here we go at last. He begins by outlining a rough history of armor system design in CRPGs. Classic D&D armor simply makes characters harder to hit, but in video games there's been a trend towards a more simulationist approach in which armor absorbs damage while possibly making characters easier to hit. However, Josh is not a fan of armor systems that are primarily based on the dichotomy of "dodge vs block". He also disapproves of systems that use a single overly abstract numeric representation for armor effectiveness.

Josh's favored approach to armor is a Damage Threshold or Damage Reduction-based system, and preferably a combination of both as seen in Fallout 1 & 2. Fallout: New Vegas primarily used DT, but given more development time he probably would have assigned a larger role to DR in its systems (as he eventually did with his JSawyer mod). Pillars of Eternity also had DT-based armor, but Josh believes the game's profusion of damage types and generally higher damage values made the system unwieldy. For Pillars of Eternity II, he replaced this with a penetration-based system inspired by Darklands, but that turned out to be even more confusing to players.

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In future titles, Josh plans to use a more straightforward combination of DT and DR, with the former scaling over the course of the game and the latter using fixed percentage values depending on armor type. Alternatively, he might revisit the penetration concept but use a small number of categories (Low/Medium/High) instead of numeric values to make things easier to understand. Of course, all of this probably isn't relevant to his next game, which isn't going to have a combat system at all.

 

[agris]

on the road to returning to an armor system deployed a quarter of a century ago!

 

[luj1]

on the road to attention-whoring

 

[luj1]

In future titles, Josh plans to use a more straightforward combination of DT and DR

you sound like his lawyer and whore

 

[Desiderius]

Yes, Josh, we're too stupid to figure out your armor system and not dissatisfied that you put a massive hole in the middle of it.

God save us from progtard snobbery.

 

[Tavernking]

Just woke up from a dream about this guy. Total nutcase telling me about his darklands-inspired medieval RPG. He made it sound like he was hopeless and the systems he designs for it need to be scrapped and redone all the time. I could tell it was going to be a bad game.

 

[Butter]

I was kind of hoping that after 20 years of working on RPGs, he'd have more insight to offer than "DT + DR is good". This is probably his shittiest talk ever.

 

[agris]

It’s a testament to the “field” chasing its own tale for two decades plus.

 

[rojay]

You'd all suck his dick for a nickel.

But I tell joke, yes?

 

[Dr1f7]

ill give u a god damn road to get on

 

[Tavernking]

I will never stop dreaming about you Josh

 

[Crichton]

I watched this tonight; not bad, but not much new here for RPG fans who've played all the games he talks about. I agree with a couple of his points:

1) Hiding the rules from the player through abstract (higher number = better protection, but we can't or won't explain how much) systems like Skyrim lead to poor player engagement. (though he could take his own advice; at one time there were multiple, competing theories for how Pillars action speed worked)

2) Multiple progressive defensive systems (AC/Dodge versus DR/DT) are impossible to balance, one inevitably outstrips the other.

I would have liked to see more discussion about how to deal with different sorts of defensive effects (magic, feats) in a fantasy context to avoid having either useless options or total invulnerability. I also thought he glossed over some of the difficulties posed by the Deadfire system, like the impossibility of overpenetration as DT values continually increase or the opacity of enemy penetration values.

 

[Desiderius]

It's not impossible but the big flat stretch in the curve means it basically is just a janky crit multiplier (have to crit to overpenetrate) while any progress you gain over mediocre penetration is wasted in you're not critting.

 

[hivemind]

>sawyer gets paid 600K a year(post tax) for this
dios mio....

 

[Diggfinger]

Wonderful talk!

Is there still some hope we will get (some) combat in his new game...?
Hope so, dont like story-only RPGs...

 

[ciox]

Huh, from his older posts I remember he hated a lot on Fallout 1 and Fallout 2's armor system, saying DT+DR is too strong in the games, and is only balanced out by maximum DR caps and crits that ignore armor.

Underrail has done a good job with a DT+DR system pretty much since release, but it doesn't seem like Sawyer is aware of that game, maybe that's changed.

Since he's shilling a DT+DR system again, I wonder if he's integrated Styg's avantgarde innovation of only using the DT or the DR stat depending on which one would be more effective, and not both.

 

[FreeKaner]

Sawyer is literally autistic. There is no other way to explain why he has same damage value on all weapons of same speed. There is no other way to explain the POE2 armor system. It is so streamlined for no other reason to streamline. New Vegas DR+DT was perfect and handled wide variety of damage ranges of weapons well. PoE1 DT (DR in there) would have worked fine too if not for his autistic streamlining which actually made the game unbalanced.

 

[Bester]

Hiding the rules from the player through abstract (higher number = better protection, but we can't or won't explain how much) systems like Skyrim lead to poor player engagement.

Did he say that? He's wrong.

A counter example: imagine a game with a huge scarcity of items. You find an iron apron with AC 5, then ten hours later into the game you find a chainmail with AC 15. You'll be happy as a pie. It doesn't matter than you don't know the formula. As long as you can FEEL the difference in combat, you're all good.
Used to be that we'd use unidentified items in older games and as long as it felt better, it was good enough. He obviously never enjoyed them because he's mentally deficient and doesn't know joy.

Also, hilarious that he shits on Skyrim (poor player engagement), while Skyrim engaged more players than all his games combined ever will.

 

[thesheeep]

Hiding the rules from the player through abstract (higher number = better protection, but we can't or won't explain how much) systems like Skyrim lead to poor player engagement.

Did he say that? He's wrong.

A counter example: imagine a game with a huge scarcity of items. You find an iron apron with AC 5, then ten hours later into the game you find a chainmail with AC 15. You'll be happy as a pie. It doesn't matter than you don't know the formula. As long as you can FEEL the difference in combat, you're all good.

Also, hilarious that he shits on Skyrim (poor player engagement), while Skyrim engaged more players than all his games combined ever will.

This is also a bit weird to me.

There are unlimited ways to shit on Skyrim, but you really can't say that Skyrim's armor system doesn't work. Numbers go up, you take less damage. Does what it says on the tin.

I always prefer to have exact numbers and formulas given to me, sure, but it's not the end of the world if that doesn't happen.
I also doubt that it has anything to do with player engagement. Engage with what? The armor system calculation? What for?
Determining if an armor is better than your current one should be an easy yes/no check - or multiple checks in case there are different values for different types of damage.

 

[Faarbaute]

It's all so tiresome.

 

[Humbaba]

Does he mention Warhammer style AV/AP systems? Because that's simple and intuitive, I wonder why video games don't use it.

 

[Iskramor]

He replaced metally rerarded AC system with even worse in poe lel.

 

[Roguey]

There are unlimited ways to shit on Skyrim, but you really can't say that Skyrim's armor system doesn't work. Numbers go up, you take less damage. Does what it says on the tin.

The Skyrim issue which he's mentioned before:

Pure % DR turns into extra hit points against which there isn't any real tactic. Non-linear scaling -- where you get some abstract armor value like "291" that correlates to a percentage value based on your level and the enemy's level -- is a black box that forces people to reverse engineer what's going on just to make sense of how their bonuses influence how well protected they are. In both of these cases, the general result is that armor doesn't really feel like much of anything. In a system where you have inflating hit point values, percentile reduction also forces the damage values to spike even higher and higher because a greater portion of it is being swallowed by the % reduction. You wind up with endgame scenarios like Fallout 1 and 2, where % DR negates such a huge amount of incoming damage that typically only triple damage armor-bypassing crits (against the eyes, naturally) really get through.

Yeah, higher number = better but just how far can you push those numbers before you hit diminishing returns? The system doesn't tell you.

 

[ciox]

Just turn some of the big attacks into multi-hit attacks?

Starcraft figured this out in 1998.

 

[thesheeep]

Yeah, higher number = better but just how far can you push those numbers before you hit diminishing returns? The system doesn't tell you.

So what, though?
As I said, giving more precise information is better, obviously.
But as long as "higher number = better" remains true, it works well enough.

I also don't see any situation in which you wouldn't pick a better armor just because the increase in protection from say, 10->15 would be less than the increase from 5->10.
You'll still want to equip that armor (if you can).