Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Butter]

I don't get how people can like this guy or listen to him. I've been more than patient with him, and I've gotta call it like I see it.

He's a disappointment. That's all there is to it.

I mean how many good games has he headed up? Legitimately how many good games?
One out of how many, 5, 6? How many? If thats baseball he's batting .165 which isn't so hot.

So whats he good at? Hipster trash and sounding smart and deflecting. Thats it.

Out of 4 that he headed up from start to finish, 2 are excellent and 2 are okay.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Which?

 

[Butter]

FNV and IWD2: excellent.
PoE and PoE2: okay.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Out of those, only FNV is worth a damn. And then barely because they got some aspects right at a time when FO was in the shitter due to Bethesda and Todd.

IWD2 is just another Infinity Engine game, not that great overall and had nothing setting it apart from the others. PoE is garbage unless you factor in the White March, which makes it acceptable. And PoE2? Not gonna play it, not gonna find out. Enough people on the site who's opinions I trust tell me its lousy, so that's where I put it.

Your opinions on games blow.

 

[Kazuki]

Rather wasting a time and emotion to hate a guy who never likely give a damn about some guy opinion on internet.

Tbh i think Sawyer already way past of his prime and the best of him already behind him, but i will not wasting my time to bitching about it.

POE is mediocre and disappointment we already know this, so why further discussion? I dislike the game and move on rather wasting my time hating on designer.

Personally i don't give a single fuck about the person personal political view and lifestyle as long he delivers a good game, which sadly Sawyer isn't deliver on it so far.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

This is the codex. As long as there are threads devoted to a guy I think is shit I'll bitch about it.

 

[Kazuki]

This Codex thing about being personally offended by People who deliver a bad rpg video game is never going to be a thing i will embrace.

So for example if there's decent guy that develop and releasing a bad rpg. So we must hate that guy like he had just murdered our own child? For me it just not rationale and sane.

But i guess i wasting my time on this, if you hate the guy be my guest. I just offered my opinion on that matter.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

If a guy continues to deliver shit and still stay in this industry then I don't give a fuck how good of a person he is, he's Typhoid Mary spreading the disease.

I don't hate him, I think he's an awful dev. I think he's pretentious. I dislike his personality. And I think he's autistic. I don't think he understands concepts of fun like a normal person. I think he's obsessive.

All of this makes him lousy as a dev and a person.

 

[CappenVarra]

count me in as the eleventh angry guy with tastes narrower than a hallway in a camp of pygmy dwarves

 

[Flying Dutchman]

I don't get how people can like this guy or listen to him. I've been more than patient with him, and I've gotta call it like I see it.

He's a disappointment. That's all there is to it.

My only issue with Soywer is that he does not seem to understand what fun for normal, breathing human beings are, and it influences what seems to be very bizarre design decisions that are... not surprisingly... not fun.

Whoever let this autist into system design should have mentored him for another decade or more.

Also, glancing at his tabletop campaigns, they seem equally bizarre in their choices for what equates to entertainment.

 

[pomenitul]

Truly, Josh's greatest failing is his inability to please the normies, who notoriously congregate around the website rpgcodex.net.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

“I’m angry about how this guy is obsessive, pretentious, and autistic, so I am going to make 20 posts in 24 hours on an obscure crpg forum about it.”

 

[Major_Blackhart]

“I’m angry about how this guy is obsessive, pretentious, and autistic, so I am going to make 20 posts in 24 hours on an obscure crpg forum about it.”

Now you're getting it. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Quick fix

Now you're getting it. Fuck him and the horse bike he rode in on.

 

[jac8awol]

“I’m angry about how this guy is obsessive, pretentious, and autistic, so I am going to make 20 posts in 24 hours on an obscure crpg forum about it.”

An obscure crpg forum? This is the codex! The alpha and omega of RPGs, the best there is, was or ever will be. Other rpg sites are lined up outside our ex's house just to get a chance to go down on something that once held our majesty!

 

[Nano]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/630786138726121472/hi-josh-in-your-opinion-what-was-the-best-game

Hi josh, in your opinion what was the best game engine you and your teams worked on that were the best to work with and what was the worst one when working on development of games.

I have a hunch that most experienced game developers think about engines less in terms of “best” and more in terms of “least bad” or “best for this type of game”.

IMO, Unity is the best engine for small scale games and small teams. You might be thinking, “Like Pillars of Eternity?” No, in retrospect I actually think both Pillars and Deadfire are too big for Unity. But if you have a team of 1-10 people, it’s fantastic. It’s easy to rapidly prototype in Unity and the editor is easy to work in.

Unreal is pretty good for larger scale games. I don’t think it’s as great for small teams because there’s more overhead just to getting things up and running (again, IMO). I have to also qualify my opinions on Unreal because I’ve never directed a game using it, I’ve only worked on it as a staff level developer.

Obsidian’s Onyx engine started out being pretty nightmarish (Aliens-era) and seemed to get a lot better on subsequent projects (Dungeon Siege III, South Park: TSoT). The area pipeline was incredibly fragile/hard to work with and scripting was practically nonexistent, a reactionary consequence of programming leads having bad experiences with our over-scripted games like NWN2 (see below).

If you wanted to do more or less exactly what it did, the Infinity Engine was pretty easy to work with. That said, there was a boatload of broken and bad stuff in it / the editor when we were working with it. But in terms of making content, the pipelines were pretty straightforward. All of the scripting was LUA and even though I didn’t do much of it, was also pretty straightforward.

I came onto NWN2 fairly late, but the NWN1 engine and editor were actually pretty easy to work with. By replacing the editor and renderer (things that were arguably technically necessary) we made it a lot harder to work with, even if it was more flexible. Neverwinter Script is very powerful, powerful enough for junior designers to write scripts that turn into nooses for them.

Bethesda’s engine was the easiest to create content for, by far. Source control was easy, iterations were fast, the scripting language was pretty powerful – just easy to work in. Not necessarily easy to change, but if you wanted to do what we did on F:NV, which was make a bunch of new content and new features for the F3 engine, it was great.

The RenderWare engine was not awful to work with (at Midway), but RenderWare Studio was very slow and painful. I did not have a good experience working in that editor.

When Black Isle was using LithTech (1.0) for Torn, I would argue that the engine was not even ready to be used as middleware. One of many problems that plagued the Torn team.

The Jefferson/Van Buren engine was kind of a pain to work with on Jefferson but became much easier to work with on Van Buren. Still, the area pipeline was slow and fragile because of how lightmaps were baked/exported.

I think that covers all of the engines I feel comfortable opining on.

"Seemed to"? He worked with Onyx again on Stormlands, no?

 

[Drakortha]

Joshua Sawyer changed my life.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Bleh.

 

[vortex]

Potentially, can Obsidian use idTech 7 (Doom Eternal engine) for their games ? This would be rad. idTech is tested and proved.

 

[Quillon]

They should ideally use creation engine :D if they can get their hands on it as they want to emulate bethesda style but second best option(since they won't make a new/improve their propriety engine built towards their own needs) is unreal since its multi purpose/not build towards 1 type of game. But I'm not an expert

 

[soulburner]

Potentially, can Obsidian use idTech 7 (Doom Eternal engine) for their games ? This would be rad. idTech is tested and proved.

Have there ever been any open world games built on id Tech? I think this engine is still best suited for static and small areas characteristic for a corridor shooter. Some locations in Doom Eternal look vast but the playable area is rather small. I also believe it's using baked lighting since version 5, so any kind of night/day cycle is impossible.

 

[Nano]

They should ideally use creation engine :D if they can get their hands on it as they want to emulate bethesda style but second best option(since they won't make a new/improve their propriety engine built towards their own needs) is unreal since its multi purpose/not build towards 1 type of game. But I'm not an expert

Bethesda is Microsoft now too, so Creation might actually become Obsidian's regular engine. They're probably not going to switch engines on their current game at this point, though.

 

[Quillon]

Bethesda is Microsoft now too, so Creation might actually become Obsidian's regular engine.

That's why I mentioned it otherwise there are many engines which aren't licenced away that they can't possibly get their hands on. Also I doubt Bethesda will be willing to share since they'll operate "semi-independent" apparently.

 

[Roguey]

scripting was practically nonexistent, a reactionary consequence of programming leads having bad experiences with our over-scripted games like NWN2

Absurdian to skimp on scripting. Scripting is where the role playing happens (and explains why DS3 and South Park are so role-playing-light )

 

[Avarize]

Correct me if I'm wrong but Sawyer doesn't actually code himself right?