Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[hivemind]

josh please be my boyfriend

we have similar taste in movies and I can like talk shit about your games after you come home from working on them haha

 

[Flying Dutchman]

Maybe he fucking likes make up and being a pretty pretty princess. Don't judge.

 

[Bulo]

J.E. Sawyer is my favourite RPG bender

 

[Infinitron]

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/636778443962449920/are-there-any-insights-you-can-offer-about-what

warderfromtheborder asked:

Are there any insights you can offer about what players might not know about bringing a big game project to the finish line, or how a game with a troubled development history gets finished? Are decisions usually made only by a handful of people high up? Do whole teams ever get to weigh in on what they want to focus on or finish?

One constant throughout my game development history is that staff level employees have zero direct say in when a game ships. At best, team leadership consults them and passes on their opinions to decision makers above them.

So any time someone is mad because a game’s ship date changes, the staff level employees shouldn’t be the target of any ire at all. They are paid the least, often work the hardest, and do not have the power or responsibility of making high-level decisions on the project that are likely to change the ship date.

When it comes to scoping, it varies a lot from project to project. When I took over as the lead designer on Neverwinter Nights 2, IIRC we had 6 months to ship. I asked the programming team what features they were most concerned about trying to complete. We saved a huge amount of time by cutting the features they recommended. On the design side, some designers were thrilled to let go of unfinished content. Other designers had to be convinced, and in a few rare cases, I just had to say, “Tough shit,” and cut content they were unwilling to part with.

On Fallout: New Vegas, I learned the ship date of the game when I saw it on a trailer on the floor of E3. It’s the only game I’ve worked on where the ship date did not move a single day from when people above me decided it was going to ship. I had to force a lot of content to be cut because the schedule just didn’t allow enough time for everything to get finished. I also cut the post-endgame content for that reason. Eric Fenstermaker urged me to cut Caravan because it needed more iteration, but obviously I didn’t. Both Chris Avellone and I tried to keep the DLC content tightly controlled because of the short development cycles. E.g. on Honest Hearts, Travis Stout, Sydney Wolfram, and other designers wanted to make the quests more interesting / complex, but I was pretty draconian about their simplicity because we had no margin for slipping.

Pillars of Eternity did slip, but the process was different than it had been on other games. We got to decide when it would come out. In our team lead meetings, I went around the table and asked each lead individually if they believed that the game would be solid by a certain date. The game still needed a lot of patching when it shipped, but that was the first game I worked on where the leads of each department explicitly gave a thumbs up/thumbs down on the ship date.

On both Pillars and Deadfire, some features were non-negotiable in terms of scope because they had been backer-achieved goals. This added pressure that normally didn’t exist in a publisher-funded game. On Deadfire, the lead team agreed (and communicated) relatively early that we were not going to ship the game at scope on the projected date, but the owners did not move the ship date until relatively close to the end of development. IMO, this caused more problems than if they had requested the scope be reduced or had moved the ship date six months earlier.

While in all cases, the teams did triage to determine what content and features should be finished or cut, the decision to ship/not ship on a certain date was always at the discretion of the publisher or the owners. The publishers/owners are primarily concerned with operating costs, competitive launch windows, marketing timelines, and ultimately, sales/profitability post-launch.

 

[Roguey]

Eric Fenstermaker urged me to cut Caravan because it needed more iteration, but obviously I didn’t.

"You should have listened to Eric," -- Chris Avellone

 

[Quillon]

Are there still "owners" at Obs? Or do they still refer to them as owners?

 

[Nano]

E.g. on Honest Hearts, Travis Stout, Sydney Wolfram, and other designers wanted to make the quests more interesting / complex, but I was pretty draconian about their simplicity because we had no margin for slipping.

So he knows his DLC was a bore.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

E.g. on Honest Hearts, Travis Stout, Sydney Wolfram, and other designers wanted to make the quests more interesting / complex, but I was pretty draconian about their simplicity because we had no margin for slipping.

So he knows his DLC was a bore.

He doesn't think in terms of entertainment.

 

[Roguey]

So he knows his DLC was a bore.

He's known that since its release.

And speaking of Honest Hearts, I also learned that between the free-wheeling nature of F:NV's content implementation and the strict, low-risk implementation of Honest Hearts content, OEI content usually needs to fall somewhere in-between. A quest that is completely cut-and-dry bog-standard will usually come across that way even if it takes place in a new setting. A quest that is a tangled skein of nightmare scripting will probably ship as a broken mess of half-fulfilled dreams. So when it comes to working with designers, it's good to start with a really solid, stable core of gameplay but leave time for (and encourage) more risky secondary elements after the core has been developed.

Having content that's just "in" and works isn't enough -- both for designers and for people who are playing an Obsidian RPG. People enjoy weird and wacky stuff in quests; it just has to work properly. Our concepting, design, and review processes need to account for the basics but also ensure there's time for the cool and unusual stuff.

 

[hivemind]

do you think rope kid as nickname means he is into rope?

 

[hivemind]

imagine josh tying you up and forcing you to listen to some autistic bike documentaries ... in old german

 

[Nano]

hivemind, stop deluding yourself. Josh isn't a top.

 

[hivemind]

many such cases, SAD!

 

[Wunderbar]

This is why Sawyer doesn't visit codex anymore.

 

[Darth Canoli]

This is why Sawyer doesn't visit codex anymore.

He's a narcissist, he probably can't help himself, either he has an alt or he just lurks at least this thread on guest mode...

 

[Nano]

Well I think he should take it as a compliment that people want to have sex with him. He probably does, anyway.

 

[Roguey]

do you think rope kid as nickname means he is into rope?

It's a reference to a group of school kids he saw who were all tied to a rope to keep them from wandering off.

 

[hivemind]

so sad

 

[Major_Blackhart]

He's not to be pitied. Not until he takes his own life. Until then, we give him nothing but scorn.

 

[hivemind]

please dont insult josh i'm sure he is a good person

 

[Flying Dutchman]

It's a reference to a group of school kids he saw who were all tied to a rope to keep them from wandering off.

I wonder if he really meant "he saw" or meant "he was a part of" or "he tied a group of".

 

[Major_Blackhart]

He was the only one.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Major_Blackhart]

He even has to act all balanced with his fucking music.

 

[Palomides]

"I am not proud of any of the games I've worked on, so it's not that surprising that people conclude I'm incompetent from looking at my work." - J. E. Sawyer