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Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
2. It's absolutely obvious that buyers who were never really interested in POE as a game and who would never come back for its sequel, or any similar games, were a huge driving force behind its financial success.
There are many such cases of course, but I wouldn't say it's a huge thing. Like it has been mentioned many times, the biggest reason PoE2 failed is because PoE1 base game was bad and boring, so nobody came back for White March or Deadfire. Like you said, they should've looked at the sold copies for White March and set their expectations accordingly.
 

Xamenos

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Does Josh enjoy replying to people who are basically saying "here is why your game sucks"? It's humiliating.
Depression is a cruel mistress. I bet at this point he's just indulging the voices in the back of his head going all "No one likes your game, you suck at designing them, you should've become a doctor like your poor mother wanted". And alternating drowning them in hard liquor.
 

Tigranes

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Does Josh enjoy replying to people who are basically saying "here is why your game sucks"? It's humiliating.

Why is it humiliating?

If there is just one good thing about Josh Sawyer the developer, it is that he is willing to openly discuss why his games and his designs might have fucked up. It may or may not help him in the end, but we tend to get some good info about development out of it, anyway.

In the case of Deadfire, if you hated POE1/2, then it's easy to sit there and say "I know exactly why it failed, it's [list of reasons why I hated the game], lol dumbass Josh he must be in denial". Except, the Codex should well know, sales success often does not correlate with game quality at all. It's irrational and disingenious to pretend that turds like FO3 succeed because the consumers are stupid, but then Deadfire failed because consumers hated POE1 for being shit.

It's fairly easy to imagine a world where POE ended up being a more successful despite being just as shit. Or where Pathfinder sold very poorly despite being an excellent game, and where DOS1 was Larian's final game. It's very difficult to go back and figure out what exactly made a game succeed/fail in the market, e.g. what made DOS so successful, without resorting to unprovable "X game succeeded, and I liked Y feature, so that must be it".
 

Verylittlefishes

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I liked Pillars 1. It was a decent (even if flawed) Baldur's Gate clone with some nice battles and good visuals.

So I preordered the Deadfire.

...And that's how my story ends. I'd never find out what happened in the restaurant on that cold January night. I'll never recover.

1200px-743140_20180507114954_1.png
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Why is it humiliating?
Because it just is. As said above, I can't imagine that spending time talking about what a lousy designer he is would be good for his mental health.

If there is just one good thing about Josh Sawyer the developer, it is that he is willing to openly discuss why his games and his designs might have fucked up. It may or may not help him in the end, but we tend to get some good info about development out of it, anyway.

In the case of Deadfire, if you hated POE1/2, then it's easy to sit there and say "I know exactly why it failed, it's [list of reasons why I hated the game], lol dumbass Josh he must be in denial". Except, the Codex should well know, sales success often does not correlate with game quality at all. It's irrational and disingenious to pretend that turds like FO3 succeed because the consumers are stupid, but then Deadfire failed because consumers hated POE1 for being shit.

It's fairly easy to imagine a world where POE ended up being a more successful despite being just as shit. Or where Pathfinder sold very poorly despite being an excellent game, and where DOS1 was Larian's final game. It's very difficult to go back and figure out what exactly made a game succeed/fail in the market, e.g. what made DOS so successful, without resorting to unprovable "X game succeeded, and I liked Y feature, so that must be it".
Then why waste time talking about it with random people who don't have any more insight about this than the next guy?
 

Riddler

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Bubbles In Memoria
I think the a major cause for the miss match between their perception of player satisfaction with PoE1 and actual player satisfaction was twofold:
  1. They seemingly paid little attention to the sales numbers of WM.
  2. They almost exclusively engaged with communities that were positive echo chambers, such as SA, their own forums and Reddit.
They did pay some attention to communities like the RPGcodex (it seems like they read the Darth Roxor review) but to the extent they engaged with this they only used it for some minor improvements of the sequel, not as an indicator of people's opinion of the game.

I think their model for evaluating a successful game (sales + reviews) led them astray here, in large part due to it being a Kickstarter project. I don't really blame them for this, it was a fuck-up but an understandable one.

What i do blame them for is pissing away this opportunity to make great games by having bad system design, world design and transforming their writing team from the best in the industry to absolute dog-shit.
 
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:balance: memes aside, he's an experienced designer and probably past the "oh god someone in the internet said my game is shit where is the whisky" phase. Comments saying the comercially unsuccessful game was wonderful and they loved it must be heartwarming but it can't give him many ideas.
 

Verylittlefishes

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:balance: memes aside, he's an experienced designer and probably past the "oh god someone in the internet said my game is shit where is the whisky" phase. Comments saying the comercially unsuccessful game was wonderful and they loved it must be heartwarming but it can't give him many ideas.

Sawyer is a great game designer (see New Vegas/Honest Hearts), but probably not a great overall director (see New Vegas in general).
 

Zboj Lamignat

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In the case of Deadfire, if you hated POE1/2, then it's easy to sit there and say "I know exactly why it failed, it's [list of reasons why I hated the game], lol dumbass Josh he must be in denial". Except, the Codex should well know, sales success often does not correlate with game quality at all. It's irrational and disingenious to pretend that turds like FO3 succeed because the consumers are stupid, but then Deadfire failed because consumers hated POE1 for being shit.
Again, trying to make rocket science out of something relatively simple. In POEs case it's both. It was the first of its kind, gained a lot of (social) media attention and, as such, was bought by many random people. At best, these people run it to learn that they weren't in fact hardcore role players that loved IE games to bits when they were 4 years old. So they left it a "this is some old school rocket propelled grenade shit yo, absolutely loved it" review and went back to your proverbial Fallout 3. But, obviously, it was also bought by people longing for a proper iso crpg who then found out that they didn't love IE because of walls of dry text, boring char dev and killing trash for no rewards.

It's a lost cause anyway, as you can see from the above tweets, the flaws of POE are impossible to quantify and, as such, to address. Lol.
 

Quillon

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It's fairly easy to imagine a world where POE ended up being a more successful despite being just as shit. Or where Pathfinder sold very poorly despite being an excellent game, and where DOS1 was Larian's final game. It's very difficult to go back and figure out what exactly made a game succeed/fail in the market, e.g. what made DOS so successful, without resorting to unprovable "X game succeeded, and I liked Y feature, so that must be it".

Nah, it's rather easy to figure it out after the fact, the benefit of hindsight. Its baffling to witness Josh struggling to see the obvious tbh, maybe he doesn't wanna accept it because when you add up everything the result is they/he designed a game(then made a sequel over it) that neither appeals to old school players in its details nor to new players with its old school style. He failed as a designer and got rewarded for it by getting promoted to studio design director.
 

Nano

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
By the way, what's up with the whole studio design director thing? The position was created for Sawyer, and then Boyarsky was the design director for a while, and now it's Sawyer again?
 

Quillon

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By the way, what's up with the whole studio design director thing? The position was created for Sawyer, and then Boyarsky was the design director for a while, and now it's Sawyer again?

Boyarsky is Creative Director.
 

Roguey

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Yeah, Boyarsky got Avellone's old title.

Is Josh forgetting that D:OS2 is not a direct sequel? Making Deadfire one definitely didn't help.

I doubt most people knew or cared about such a thing before they bought it.
 
Vatnik
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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In
Still baffled by the decision to make an entire fantasy world from scratch, as well as a new class-based system, only for it to have so much that's unoriginal. So you have the worst of both worlds, neither tradition nor originality.
 

Quillon

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The biggest thing Josh ignored before even starting working on PoE1 is Bioware/DAO. DAO is how Bioware innovated their own IE style and became very successful too, most old players liked it as well as the new ones and Josh blatantly ignored its existence and tried to re-innovate himself. Their starting point in terms of design should have been 2009's DAO instead of the actual IE gamezzzZZZ; if they wanted it to really sell that is, otherwise they could have gone full old-school, sell very small amount and only make the codex happy :P
 

Readher

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Nov 11, 2018
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Poland


A lot of TOW criticism there, mainstream's catching up as predicted :smug:


It's /r/pcgaming, TOW was only a good game for the first month after launch there. /r/games held out longer but by now it's considered mostly medicore there as well. Doesn't really change anything as most people still expect Avowed to be amazing and excuse TOW with low budget and being AA (it shouldn't have AAA price tag then).
 

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