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Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

Roguey

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He's from Wisconsin. That's something you'll see in most every Wisconsin home. Most of that liquor is for hosting guests. Booze is cheap here and it's a common gift.

Sawyer was a teetotaler until a series of failed relationships and Deadfire turned him into an alcoholic. He drinks alone and he drinks to excess.
 

OSK

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Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
He's from Wisconsin. That's something you'll see in most every Wisconsin home. Most of that liquor is for hosting guests. Booze is cheap here and it's a common gift.

Sawyer was a teetotaler until a series of failed relationships and Deadfire turned him into an alcoholic. He drinks alone and he drinks to excess.

Sadly, that's also common here. Though those types usually don't have quite that much variety.
 

luj1

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Pillows of shiternity is a product of a 40 hour work week, PST is a product of sleeping in your office. But at least they didn't work so hard!

Like other Renaissance CRPGs, PST is a product of passion and vision. These people were literally malnourished and worked with faulty engines and old tech, but they were educated, talented and loved what they do.

Pillows of shiternity is what happens when you put a good designer into a position not suited for him. And the team was full of untalented hipsters.
 

Roguey

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These people were literally malnourished and worked with faulty engines and old tech, but they were educated, talented and loved what they do.
The Infinity Engine was cutting-edge when the Torment team got it. Interplay's RPG division was terrible when it came to tech (Fallout's engine was good for one slam dunk before it was terribly outdated and deemed not worth using for any future game, the VB/BH engine was a bust, mistakes were made with Descent and Lithtech). They also messed up Torment's engine (it's the only IE game that requires you to download a mod to keep spells from crashing the game).
 

luj1

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Doesn't matter. It's about the people, the devs, not the tech.

Today you have collosal teams with billions and the best technology and they make trash because the developer declined. There is no creativity, no originality and no passion and no balls.
 
Last edited:

Hace El Oso

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Doesn't matter. It's about the people, the devs, not the tech.

Today you have collosal teams with billions and the best technology and they make trash because the developer declined. There is no creativity, no originality and no passion and no balls.

Infinitron said something about this a couple years ago (I think during the embarrassing release of the Outer Worlds) that I still remember, because it was the truth and the truth is easy to remember.

It was that 'the time of games being developed by overeducated white men born in the 1970s was over.' Barring rare-occasional exceptions, the culture and human material is simply not there.
 

Hace El Oso

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back then it wasn't overeducated, it was just called educated

Very true. I think he meant men who weren’t simply trained in producing 3D models or programming and nothing else as is the norm today, but actually genuinely educated and enthusiastic.
 

luj1

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the difference is that back then there werent video game design degrees, so people came from literature, art or philosophy
 

Roguey

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back then it wasn't overeducated, it was just called educated
Sawyer really didn't need a history degree to design video games nor Avellone his English degree nor Fenstermaker his computer science degree from Harvard etc
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Doesn't matter. It's about the people, the devs, not the tech.

Today you have collosal teams with billions and the best technology and they make trash because the developer declined. There is no creativity, no originality and no passion and no balls.

Infinitron said something about this a couple years ago (I think during the embarrassing release of the Outer Worlds) that I still remember, because it was the truth and the truth is easy to remember.

It was that 'the time of games being developed by overeducated white men born in the 1970s was over.' Barring rare-occasional exceptions, the culture and human material is simply not there.
Ah I see we've arrived at the inevitable "bitch about millennial female writers" part of this game's lifecycle. Might as well get it over with.

But look, this isn't a thing that's going to go away. In fact it's going to get worse. And it's not really about California. Look at the demographics. Which of the two sexes reads more books today? Which one earns more college degrees, especially in literature and the humanities?

We're not going to return to the era where most of an Obsidian RPG's writers were overeducated dudes who were born in the 1970s and played Planescape: Torment in college. That generation has moved on. You should actually expect majority-female or even all-female RPG writing teams to be the norm in the future.
Infinitron referred specifically to Obsidian and to writers, not to game developers generally regardless of company or position.
It would be interesting to determine the earliest game I enjoyed that was developed primarily by people born in the 1970s; probably something later than Daggerfall, which released in 1996. :M
 

Hace El Oso

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Infinitron referred specifically to Obsidian and to writers, not to game developers generally regardless of company or position.
It would be interesting to determine the earliest game I enjoyed that was developed primarily by people born in the 1970s; probably something later than Daggerfall, which released in 1996. :M

Thanks for finding the quote, I tried searching and was buried in an avalanche of newsposts and so went off of my (in this case less than exact) memory.

I would, though, point out that he does refer to 'RPG writing teams' in general and not only Obsidian. And the truth is that the rise of dedicated writing teams, all created via dedicated university pipelines, is new, so one can't handwave it away by pointing out that many programmers will still be male. The writing teams have far more power.

In the end the point about the loss of education in the classical sense and its consequences for RPGs (and everything else) stands.
 

Frozen

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I think problem now is programing attracts rock bottom people. When doctors etc. had it as a hobby quality of product and productivity was way higher.

We have to get rid of most of these "professional" game designers they are all trash. Just look at the games they make. Learn to code may save gaming.
 

deuxhero

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Can someone with an applicable account ask "Joshua Graham's class in the GECK is "NVDLC02DestroyingAngel". Is the "Destroying Angel" part a reference to Porter Rockwell, a famous and reportedly supernaturally skilled gunslinger from Graham's "tribe" that was given that title?"
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Can someone with an applicable account ask "Joshua Graham's class in the GECK is "NVDLC02DestroyingAngel". Is the "Destroying Angel" part a reference to Porter Rockwell, a famous and reportedly supernaturally skilled gunslinger from Graham's "tribe" that was given that title?"
It's more likely just a biblical reference given Sawyer's background.
 

deuxhero

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The term doesn't actually appear in the Bible from my look. There's angels that destroy, but they aren't called that.
 

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