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Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

Humbaba

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First we'd have to agree on what an RPG is.
 

Dadd

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RPGs are the new FPS. People who like to make believe eat that shit up.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Anyone have any data on long-term sales of games by genre? I get the feeling that RPGs have far less of a dropoff in sales than most other genres.

Steam, GOG, etc can have some sales statistics but most likely wont share it :-P.

Steamspy has owner data and tell you owners but most likely but you'd need to pay. Their API doesn't give any owner data over time.

Might be possible to scrape/retrieve user review data which give review count over time and compare how the deltas for RPG reviews change compared to reviews for other categories.
 

Ryan muller

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Oct 10, 2021
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BG1 & 2 were not as or more buggy than Troika games. I'm not even going to debate this.
How can this even be accurately quantified? What matters to me (and I imagine most people) is the severity of the bug. Gamestoppers and crashes are of critical priority. Both Bioware and Troika had a few of those, and they fixed them. A lot of lower priority bugs remained unfixed, which is true for pretty much every RPG. I don't think it matters at all if one game may or may not have more unfixed low-priority bugs than another; a lot of this stuff even goes unnoticed by most.
You cant honestly argue against it.

Bg 1 and 2 could be entirely completed without manor issues even on their first version

Arcanum were so damn buggy and badly scripted that you could get hardlocked because you ve choosen a background that wouldnt let the player use magical items.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/699226458761150464/hello-i-recently-played-pillars-of-eternity-ii

destinybladez asked:
Hello, I recently played Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire again and I was wondering whether Ukaizo was always supposed to be just those two-three fights in one area and then that confrontation with Eothas? Given the importance of Ukaizo in the setting I would have expected that we would get to see some of the city before reaching Eothas. was there something cut or was it always supposed to be like that?

There are a lot of places in Deadfire where I overcompensated for criticism to something in Pillars of Eternity. Ukaizo and the Guardian are prime examples. A fair number of people complained that the pacing of the last third of Pillars of Eternity felt off. Specifically, Twin Elms was quite long overall and Breaith Eaman was a pretty big dungeon punctuated by a tough boss fight that many people felt was an unreasonable difficulty spike.
For that reason, I designed Ukaizo to be brief and the Guardian battle to be avoidable. You can't usually avoid the fight with the faction rival, but those fights are designed to be easy; they're not "really" supposed to feel challenging.
There's also some weird scripting that makes the alliance with the water dragon automatically skip the Guardian fight -- which may not be what the player wants.
In retrospect, I think it would have been nice to see more of Ukaizo and to tune the Guardian/rival faction fights and conditions more. We just ran out of time.

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/699322059617124352/several-portraits-in-deadfire-are-based-on

softcoregamer asked:
Several portraits in Deadfire are based on developers (Talfor, Jacob Harker, etc) did the developers who were used decide which characters they'd be used for?

I don't think it was a formal process. It was more ad hoc as we went. I think we asked people if they wanted to be used for portraits and if so, they could put a picture into a folder for the artists to use. The artists would use that folder as a grab bag for NPCs they needed to illustrate. I didn't pick Talfor; an artist (Matt, I think) just chose my picture to use as the basis of the portrait.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/699570715403370496/hi-josh-ive-been-trying-to-transition-into

selkiesun asked:
Hi Josh, I've been trying to transition into narrative design for a couple of years now and I find that most posted jobs are for Leads. Very few roles for Juniors ever come up, and tbh it usually feels like they're just there to facilitate internal hires. I know you're not a hiring manager, and I know you can only speak to practices at your own company, but do you think it's worth it for Juniors to send in a resume unprompted to a company they're very interested in? I'm honestly struggling to come up with other possibilities as a marginalized person now that Twitter networking might be going the way of the dodo...

I think that if there are no listing for narrative designers, I wouldn't send applications as a rule. There may very well be no positions open, and sending unprompted resumes and getting no response or a bunch of "no open positions" responses could be demoralizing.
If there are one or two companies you're really interested in, I don't think it would be bad to send in your resume, but it still might be demoralizing.
What I would say is if you see postings for intermediate/staff-level writers, apply to those even if you don't have the listed experience. I'm not going to say you have a good chance of getting the job, but sometimes intermediate positions don't get filled for a while and the goalposts shift to one or more junior/associate positions.
Also, if/when junior/associate positions open, if your resume is already somewhere in the stack, there's a chance a hiring manager might hit you up because someone actually laid eyes on it during the last round.
Sorry it's rough right now. Good luck.

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/699570757601263616/is-there-any-piece-of-existing-media-that-you

manzo-the-saw asked:
Is there any piece of existing media that you would be actively excited to do franchise work for (regardless of legal feasibility), even now that your studio has enough oomph to just use its own IPs?

I don't really think so, no. I wouldn't rule it out but that's not what interests me at this point in my career.
 
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Roguey

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video game industry running out of money to hire terrible writers
Likes

MDZS, avatar the last airbender, cowboy bebop, star trek (tos, tng, ds9), space in general, natsume yuujinchou, LoZ, horizon: zero dawn, most things Obsidian, dnd, irish trad, literally any animal, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, socialism

Dislikes

star trek (aos), marvel/dc, non-intersectional feminism, 'all lives matter’, fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism, industrialized animal farming

Yeah, would have been a shoo-in a few years ago.
 
Joined
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Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
video game industry running out of money to hire terrible writers
Likes

MDZS, avatar the last airbender, cowboy bebop, star trek (tos, tng, ds9), space in general, natsume yuujinchou, LoZ, horizon: zero dawn, most things Obsidian, dnd, irish trad, literally any animal, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, socialism

Dislikes

star trek (aos), marvel/dc, non-intersectional feminism, 'all lives matter’, fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism, industrialized animal farming

Yeah, would have been a shoo-in a few years ago.
Likes irish trad,
Dislikes fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism,
:notsureifserious:
 

Lady Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
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Strap Yourselves In
Pretty cool that Deadfire became profitable. Say what you want, but I would like to see a PoE 3 one day. Just change the engine or fix the insane loading times. Entering new maps should be instantaneous.
I think Deadfire was the first game I tried before and after SSD. The difference is massive (from 30 seconds to maybe 2-5 seconds), since it is a lot of small files being loaded.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it
 

soulburner

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Problem is, there's so much traveling and back tracking between separate locations in Deadfire that even those 3-5 seconds to load is too long for me.
I recall someone from Obsidian talked about some sort of precaching solution for sub-areas which would result in an instant load when entering a house or something. It never came into fruition.

I also noticed only a single CPU core is being used during the loading process and a reasonably fast NVMe SSD is no longer the bottleneck. I'd like to see what this process looks like on a current gen hardware, like a Ryzen 7000 series CPU.
 

Roguey

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in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it
Why does Deadfire's main menu take forever to load? I vaguely recall that PoE's was pretty much instant like most games.
 

Butter

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in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it
Why does Deadfire's main menu take forever to load? I vaguely recall that PoE's was pretty much instant like most games.
That's probably when they cache a lot of resources for use on subsequent loading screens. It fucking sucks though. My recollection is that Deadfire loads about as slowly as PoE1 overall.
 

Roguey

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deadfire loads way, way faster. A few seconds per loading screen at worst.
My experience with most of these Unity engine games (and Pillars in particular) is that the load times start relatively fast and then get longer and longer as the save file gets bigger. Good programmers find ways to keep the save file small.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700210617527762944/hi-josh-how-are-u-hope-you-doing

pedriran asked:
Hi, Josh. How are u? Hope you doing great.
Recently you said that you finished Pentiment 3 times already, and the last beat take 21 hours. And that make me wondering... How it feels play your own game knowing everything that will happen?
I mean, can you enjoy your games in the same way that you enjoy others people game?
Congratulations to you and the team for Pentiment being Gold. Can't wait to play it.

I can enjoy the games I've worked on but I think it's impossible to enjoy them in the same way. Obviously I know everything that's going to happen, so it can't really surprise me in the way that (hopefully) it surprises a new player. Also I'm very critical of everything I work on, so I don't even look at it in a spirit of entertainment. I'm always looking for things that aren't quite right and trying to figure out how to fix them.

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700...-my-partner-are-very-excited-for?source=share

danwhat asked:
both I and my partner are very excited for Pentiment's release!
when it comes to judging the game's success, does it matter if I make the choice to play it via Game Pass, vs buying it on Steam?

Thank you. I honestly don't think it matters. It certainly doesn't matter to me.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700644130690400256/hi-josh-just-wanted-to-say-hi-first-and-say

strat-edgy asked:
Hi Josh! Just wanted to say hi, first, and say that I am a big fan.
I was playing the Fallout New Vegas DLCs for a video, and I got the urge to check out the release dates on them and was shocked to see that 3 of the 4 were released within 2 or 3 months of one another. What was it like to work on those on that tight a schedule, or were there multiple teams working on different DLCs in tandem?
I looked around to see if you'd answered this question, so sorry if I missed you answering this before, I was just wondering.

There were two teams working concurrently in different phases, though various technical reasons made the schedule a little irregular. The Dead Money team spun up at the end of core FNV, then the remainder of the core team rolled off onto other projects, including Honest Hearts, then as Honest Hearts was winding down, OWB spun up. Lonesome Road was kind of the outlier since it was last (other than Gun Runners Arsenal, which was - very different overall so not really comparable).
So DM overlapped core NV, HH overlapped DM and OWB, and OWB overlapped LR.
And yeah I don't really like that pace of content development and release even if it's ideal for "attachment" (i.e. percentage of core players who buy the DLC).
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Which other Xbox studios besides inXile?
 
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