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Good self-reflection, let's hope something good comes out of it.
And WTH were they thinking with scripted ship combat?!
A 3D template for naval battles costs €50 on Unity asset store.
I think his judgement is too much subjective,
no matter Feargus brought back the feature, it was Sawyer who envisioned its original form.
Still feels like he doesn't really understand why Deadfire got the underwhelming response it did but i guess it can be hard when to make a truly critical assessment of one's own work when there is such major outside interference.
My thoughts exactly. He acknowledges the backlash based on figures like sales or ratings, but I think on principle he still believes his aims were right, and he's going to do the same thing again, albeit in a somewhat different manner.
It seems likely to me that they will make a turn-based game next in response to the reception of DF and DOS2 and i feel like he would do much better with that.
It seems likely to me that they will make a turn-based game next in response to the reception of DF and DOS2 and i feel like he would do much better with that.
Honestly I somewhat understand what drives him, and IMO he'd have more satisfaction balancing a PvP title like an MMO or RTS even (should he ever come to terms with working on one), however in single player games, balancing by maximizing every build feasibility effectively takes away the weight of character choices and pleasure of buildcrafting. People can say it's min/maxing and munchkinism, but it's a single player game. Live with your choices, or just roll back a fucking save game, whatever your play style is. It's a single player game FFS, there's no competition to be fair with while you play.
Better. Simply more enjoyable in all aspects, also makes some spells more worthwhile. Takes longer, though. Duh.
Obviously talking about the harder/hardest difficulty, don't even try to play on anything less or you'll be bored to death.
Honestly I somewhat understand what drives him, and IMO he'd have more satisfaction balancing a PvP title like an MMO or RTS even (should he ever come to terms with working on one), however in single player games, balancing by maximizing every build feasibility effectively takes away the weight of character choices and pleasure of buildcrafting. People can say it's min/maxing and munchkinism, but it's a single player game. Live with your choices, or just roll back a fucking save game, whatever your play style is. It's a single player game FFS, there's no competition to be fair with while you play.
Absolutely.
But then you'll get people like our own few special snowflakes here who want all challenge and imbalance to be removed from character building so they don't have to use that space between their ears and can be whoever they want to be and the game will love them either way.
And that's who design philosophy like that of PoE2 caters to.
Still feels like he doesn't really understand why Deadfire got the underwhelming response it did but i guess it can be hard to make a truly critical assessment of one's own work when there is such major outside interference.
How the hell are you supposed to deliver a good product when major alterations that you deemed bad and extremely time-consuming are forced upon you by clueless managers? He was practically broken by this development cycle and it seems OBS owners have yet another scalp to their name with burning out yet another of their star developers (although Josh is more of director/planner than a developer really).
The rate at which senior developers are either fleeing from or are broken by their god-awful management is truly astounding.
Isn't it like that across the industry? I don't think I've heard of a single success story where the product was a good game and all the developers were happy as well. Maybe Blizzard's early stuff with their super long development cycles - but what other company can get away with that?
It must be soul crushing to see that all that pen and paper RPG knowledge, all that Infinity Engine RPG knowledge, all that history knowledge amounted to nothing in the end.
Well, his opinion basically filtered all of his tabletop and Infinity Engine RPG knowledge into "they all did it wrong, and I'll show them how to do it right!". Surprise, surprise, one dude did not do it more right than decades of pen and paper designers.
Still feels like he doesn't really understand why Deadfire got the underwhelming response it did but i guess it can be hard to make a truly critical assessment of one's own work when there is such major outside interference.
How the hell are you supposed to deliver a good product when major alterations that you deemed bad and extremely time-consuming are forced upon you by clueless managers? He was practically broken by this development cycle and it seems OBS owners have yet another scalp to their name with burning out yet another of their star developers (although Josh is more of director/planner than a developer really).
The rate at which senior developers are either fleeing from or are broken by their god-awful management is truly astounding.
Isn't it like that across the industry? I don't think I've heard of a single success story where the product was a good game and all the developers were happy as well. Maybe Blizzard's early stuff with their super long development cycles - but what other company can get away with that?
Blizzard's earlier titles actually had short dev cycles. It was only later when they were obsessed with not fucking up that they became characteristically long.
This has always been the case. Japanese turn based RPGs sell like crazy and always have. The reason why western TB is more popular now is because the retarded TB design typical of western turn based games these days finally has an audience dumb enough to enjoy them (IE: Original Sin).
Turn based and real time action both attract a particular type of retard (90% of the population) leaving very few people who enjoy both tactics and mayhem.
Still feels like he doesn't really understand why Deadfire got the underwhelming response it did but i guess it can be hard when to make a truly critical assessment of one's own work when there is such major outside interference.
My thoughts exactly. He acknowledges the backlash based on figures like sales or ratings, but I think on principle he still believes his aims were right, and he's going to do the same thing again, albeit in a somewhat different manner.
So Sawyer is still confused why Dumpsterfire failed? Somebody please explain to him the real test of how good a sequel will sell, is not how good it is, but how good the original was
I'm surprised that the companion interactions were critiqued. I thought the structure of them was fine; it was the companions themselves who never grabbed me. No bros like Wrex or Garrus from Mass Effect, no Steven Heck from Steven Heck Protocol, and nobody as generally bland and likable as most of the PoE1 companions.
I have similar thoughts about the combat system. I might give it another go in turn-based out of curiousity, but I don't think RTwP was the actual problem. Rather, I believe PoE1 and 2 both suffered from simply having way too many numbers and too few elements that actually mattered in combat. I think Sawyer thought that having so many numbers on the screen at all time would allow for fine-tuned balance, but it mostly became difficult to parse and I never felt - in either game - like those numbers allowed for interesting or meaningful decision making in combat beyond fairly normal small-scale RTS play. Hold choke points, use your units correctly, kite your squishy units, and you'll do fine.
To digress onto a similar point, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the RTwP core concept. Just that it's applied to games that really should be turn-based, with complex stats and a need to constantly micromanage the positions of a few too many characters at once. I think having a pause feature is fine in these types of games, but if it's balanced around pausing every few seconds to issue orders, then you're basically just forcing players to create their own turns which is frustrating to manage. RPGs that focus on real-time combat would likely be better suited by positioning themselves closer to ARPGs with party management, rather than the turn-based tabletop games that inspired them.
I'll edit this post with some of the major points.
Assumptions:
PoE is in a shared space with DOS (Swen Vincke told them this is not the case)
If we refine formula, sales and reviews will improve ("Totally wrong!" -Josh Sawyer)
Criticism: Combat is Hard to Follow
-Baldur's Gate using RtwP was "kind of revolutionary." RTSes were popular then but not as much now.
-Effects rendering confused what was actually going on
-Engagement was not clear to many players, changes were made
-6 characters to 5 characters irritated people but was necessary to make combat somewhat clear
-AI Customization system allowed players to better control and understand combat
Criticism: Stronghold Feels Disconnected
-Didn't have the resources to integrate it as well as they wanted to (in PoE1)
-Making stronghold a ship dovetailed well with the traveling notion
Criticism: Stronghold Mechanics Are Boring
-Sawyer: Can't disagree with that
-Will talk about Ship-to-ship later
Criticism: Voice-Over Was Inconsistent
-Streamers hated unvoiced text
-DOS2 set a new standard with full VO, Josh hates them for it (obviously jocular), and they couldn't ignore it
Criticism: Too Many Trash Fights
-There were a lot of unimportant fights.
-Changes were made to level development and used a tool to see what mobs were in a level easily so they could make alterations if a designer put the same fights all over a map
Criticism: Environments Felt Too Static
-No dynamic vegetation, only dynamic cloth on characters, characters did not blend into the background well
-Made NPC behavior/scheduling routines
-Extensive rendering was done
-Unity 4 to Unity 5
-Introduced vegetation and cloth physics
-Introduced shadow something or other (I don't understand what he's talking about, about 14 minutes in)
-Introduced parallax layers in some areas
-Licensed Ceto for water graphics
Criticism: Load Times Were Very Bad
-Changed to hub-based loading
-Rewrote Save/load system to not change loads of variables and such
Criticism: Companion Reactivity Was Bad
-More in-depth budgeting for writing, and started budgeting early
-Companion writing done late in development (rationale is that we can write them with late story developments)
-Companion writing was very extensive and made the previous point difficult
-Added companion "leave" conditions
-Topic and reactions system did not work very well. Was a cool idea, will talk about later
Criticism: Slow Start/Ambiguous Motivation
-Main villain was not around much, not super clear why you're chasing him
-Eothas is immediately the known antagonist
-Pacing was iterated on
Criticism: Factions Were Under-developed
-When you leave Defiance Bay, factions are irrelevant
-Deadfire's factions were (effectively) omnipresent
-Factions centrality confused the plot, Josh takes personal responsibility
-Characters feel strongly associated with certain factions, MCA is apparently responsible for this idea (possibly from back in PoE)
Backer Beta
-self-selected audience, very limited
-very good feedback, but its feedback for "psychotic gamers"
-will skew understanding of how game plays for wider audience
-Not much story content
-Made it difficult for Obs. to understand difficulty because the content gets done over-and-over again
What We Heard:
-New mechanics were confusing and/or punishing (good changes based on this)
-Everyone moved too fast
-Ship-to-ship sucked
-Many technical issues
Reception at Launch:
-Too easy
-Performance problems
-Everyone loved VO
-Main plot was too short
-Ambiguous stakes in main plot
-Companion relationships mechanics didn't make sense
-People wanted sidekicks as fully fleshed out companions
Post-Launch Short Term
-Main plot too short, nothing to be done
-S-to-S UI improvements and balance tuning but some people weren't going to like ti no matter what
-Tuning relationship mechanics, made record of changes in relationships to make clear why some relationships soured
-Performance optimizations - no silver bullets
-Difficulty: nerfed builds as quickly as possible that were too powerful and changed encounters that were too easy
Controverisal Features: 5 character party
-Pillars characters are more active that e.g. rangers in previous RPGs
-Explosion of potential maintenance b/c characters are leveling up and getting new abilities
-Battle sizes came down as a result of smaller party
-Combat became easier to follow
5 character party reception
-People grumbled, but if it actually makes a good change in the game keep going
-Minority were really angry
-Change was made in response to feedback (ie. combat too hard to read)
Companion Relationships Mechanics
-He summarizes the mechanics
-Josh was trying to compromoise between mechanically-driven relationship changes and hand-crafted
-Players make hundreds of dialogue choices, why not make it dovetail with a mechanical system
-Designers and programmers had difficulty understanding/using it
-Tuning was difficult because nodes are arbitrary (e.g. anti-religious, racist are subjective things) and values for topics were arbitrary
-Organic system is hard to test. That is the point. What "feels good" is subjective.
-Not good reception to the system
-Failures of system were artificial
-Would only do it again after simplifying the system
Ship-to-ship Combat
-Board gamey and not well liked
-Guys can we not turn this into the pirate game? It became exactly the pirate game.
-Game within a game
-Huge amount of resources for the alpha, huge amount of negative feedback from the team
-More resources, more negative feedback so Josh cut it
-"My boss brought it back as a crowdfunding goal."
-Most expensive feature in PoE2 in terms of dev time and money spent
-Drain on every department and never seem to really satisfy players
-Large amount of players hated everything about it
-Always needed more investment
-Josh would absolutely not do it again
Full VO
-Lots of internal debate
-Josh thought it was too late
-Josh only person with prior experience with full VO on New Vegas
-Owners overruled him on not doing full VO
-Critical Role came on to do major character voices (I don't know who this is)
-Writers were taken away from narrative design to write dialogue
-Recording across 3 time zones, owners will not move the schedule and people missed recording sessions
-Most intense personal pressure
-Full VO went over very well
-Critical Role added tremendously
-Josh would not do it again under same circumstances. Very demoralizing for narrative team. With proper time, would do it again
DLCs
-DLCs did fantastic job, much more focused than OC
-Debate about 1 expansion vs. 3 DLCs, owners wanted DLCs
-God Challenges were significant as well as post-launch tuning
-Narrative changes in 5.0 patch partially addressed ambiguities
Post-Launch Turn-Based Combat
-Josh actively resisted it because it didn't fit with "action economy," but relented to perfect-vs.-good argument.
-Nick Carver's idea, working with Brian McIntosh
-Tried because DOS sold very well
-Most significant addition to the game, was a lot of work, but not nearly as much as ship-to-ship
-Almost universally positive reception
Lessons Learned:
-It's not the late '90s anymore. Pillars doesn't have to continue to be restricted to RtwP.
-Most invested demographic are hardcore, and neglecting difficulty is a mistake.
-Cut quicksand features ASAP
-Expectation of full VO is real. Expensive in money and time and you have to have it locked in early. Planning very important.
-Plot should have been one struggle, not two. Josh takes full responsibility.
-Josh should direct a different type of game next. He's a little burned out on party-based RPGs.
Single Q&A (I think he went over his time budget):
Cretinous Eurodev ("I also work on an RPG game" ) asks him if he ever was able to do a full playthrough as he had not. Josh thinks it is important. He completed 1 Full PT, and 3 partial PTs. Josh wants to work on the game and make things rather than just play and give feedback to departments. Difficult balancing act unless team makes time to play the game. Obsidian had some "team play days," but is difficult to ask people to do that on top of regular work schedule.
Ship combat looked kinda simple or something so I thought it was kinda easy to do or something, wouldn't have thought it would be the hardest thing to implement.
Would have been nice if there were more questions at the end.
I liked the aims of PoE, but the execution was terrible. The game just wasn't fun. To analogize, It's just like the "hollow born" of Dyrwood. They seem fine at first, but as it matures you realize there is nothing inside. Only an abominable doppelganger of life.
A system with "no bad builds" but has an abundance of fiddly stats and variables amounts to much ado about nothing. Massive spreadsheet--all but meaningless. Horrible design.
Too many classes. Forced lots of bullshit distinctions which made bogus and gimmicky abilities. System he made should have been classless.
Balance fetish.
Not-D&D syndrome. Similar, but worse, version of Forgotten Realms. Attempts to distinguish itself as not-D&D both abound and fail.
Bland meandering story. Started strong and died just after birth when you resolve the first town.
I got PoE 2 for free, yet still haven't bothered. My brain sees screenshots, and it looks so good. It looks like the IE game I wanted. I remind myself, that like a sushi bar display, it's aesthetic only.
) asks him if he ever was able to do a full playthrough as he had not. Josh thinks it is important. He completed 1 Full PT, and 3 partial PTs. Josh wants to work on the game and make things rather than just play and give feedback to departments. Difficult balancing act unless team makes time to play the game. Obsidian had some "team play days," but is difficult to ask people to do that on top of regular work schedule.
