Interview Obsidian Media Blitz: Josh Sawyer and Feargus Urquhart Interviews

[Neanderthal]

The thing with (A)D&D thieves is that outside a tabletop game, or a game specifically crafted for them, they kinda suck. They shine out of combat, and if a game doesn't have a lot of out-of-combat content, they're just deadweight. None of the party-based D&D computer games did. Josh did the right thing by not cloning AD&D thieves in a game that didn't have the content to support them.

See theres the problem for me, hardly any CRPG has content designed for specific classes and out of combat roles, its not just thieves and its not just Obs fault, but nobodies bringing this up. Wizards, clerics, fighters even, almost every class exist solely to fill a combat role because worlds are dead, painted backgrounds. We should be far, far beyond this by now.

 

[Roguey]

See theres the problem for me, hardly any CRPG has content designed for specific classes and out of combat roles, its not just thieves and its not just Obs fault, but nobodies bringing this up. Wizards, clerics, fighters even, almost every class exist solely to fill a combat role because worlds are dead, painted backgrounds. We should be far, far beyond this by now.

Fire up the NWN toolset and see if you can make a mod that has handcrafted content for every single class while also having dozens of hours of content for each playthrough.

 

[Prime Junta]

See theres the problem for me, hardly any CRPG has content designed for specific classes and out of combat roles, its not just thieves and its not just Obs fault, but nobodies bringing this up. Wizards, clerics, fighters even, almost every class exist solely to fill a combat role because worlds are dead, painted backgrounds. We should be far, far beyond this by now.

There's always Dwarf Fortress.

 

[Neanderthal]

Roguey I aint a computer game designer. Done it in p&p though.

Personally i'd have cut back on classes an areas in Poe an spent more time fleshing out both, but as I say i'm just a customer expecting more than a combat sim.

 

[Prime Junta]

Roguey I aint a computer game designer. Done it in p&p though.

Me too. Thing with PnP though is that (1) you know your party and (2) you can improvise when the players come up with something wacky, in fact that's the best part. Writing reactivity is a big and arduous job and I do not envy the poor souls who have to do it, even to the limited extent in most games that even do it at all.

The Dwarf Fortress thing was only partly a joke. I do think that a deep world simulation in the style of DF, perhaps with some human input here and there, could get there. Not just yet though, we need more progress in natural-language stuff at least.

 

[Roguey]

Done it in p&p though.

Designing things on paper and in your imagination, and reacting to your players' actions in real-time is far, far easier and quicker than making it in a computer game.

Personally i'd have cut back on classes an areas in Poe an spent more time fleshing out both, but as I say i'm just a customer expecting more than a combat sim.

As Josh said

That's genuinely cool, but we didn't Kickstart a game called Fuck You: Suck My Dick: Josh Sawyer's Personal Dream RPG Experience where I do whatever I personally think is sound and neat and good. For better or worse, this was pitched as an IE-like game. It's great that you view the experiences as more abstract than the nuts and bolts, but no, people clearly do not trust me/us to make a good game that is significantly mechanically different. And I know from experience that sort of attitude can poison a player's entire reception of the game.

 

[aweigh]

guys, it's no big secret that the Thief/Rogue class, as it was originally conceptualized (and utilized) in pen and paper (i.e. D&D) doesn't translate well to these type of computer games.

hell, this has been problematic ever since the very first attempts to transplant D&D onto PC games and the easiest example is the first Wizardry (easiest example, though far from the first).

how many times has someone moaned about the thief class in Wizardry? you've all heard about this before and the moaning is indeed justified and i'm the biggest Wizardry fanboy you'll find. Its a waste of a party member slot and you only need them because they are the best at navigating trapped chests and thus avoiding party wipes.

the problem with the thief/rogue class in more adventure game-hybrid RPGs, like baldur's gate and PoE, is still the exact same problem as found in Wizardry except even more muddled because there are more non-combat variables for the designers to contend with and it is even more apparent how incompatible the class is without a human DM / human role-playing environment.

my own 2 cents on the matter is quite simple: if there are limited amount of slots for party members and the classes available and the mechanics availble allow for a wide variety of setups, and the game designers allowed for a variety of conflict resolution permutations that overlap through the majority of the options allowed for the player...

...but you still need that 1 class in every run for that one thing they're the best at then we have a problem.

in the context of PoE itself I think it's pretty clear the Thief/Rogue class could be cut and 99% of the players would not even notice, however I don't consider this a failing of PoE itself but something indicative of design conventions.

 

[Roguey]

I enjoyed playing a rogue in Pillars and Josh considers it part of the Core Four (alongside fighter, wizard, and priest)

 

[aweigh]

i enjoyed using rogues in PoE too, especially once you get the abilitie to warp around the screen in order to set enemies up then escape their attention. however you can change the class's name to "assassin" or whatever other generic title and nothing would change, there is no real need for the class to be called rogues in PoE.

this doesn't/didn't bother me since I enjoy PoE's mechanics enough and the game provides enough options to cover a a lot of the systemic/emergent spectrum. it all depends on the game itself, and the "problem" with the thief/rogue archetype can apply to any class that is rendered redundant or hackneyed without a human role-playing environment.

in the end, though, we can all agree that without a toggle for walking the entirety of the game's char advancement systems are useless.

 

[Prime Junta]

Josh/Obs did a heroic job differentiating warrior classes, but there are just too many of them. And yeah, the rogue and the fighter are poorly differentiated -- the fighter's distinguishing characteristic is constant recovery (i.e., more staying power) and the rogue's, sneak attack (i.e., more damage). The fighter is a perfectly respectable "base" melee class, but "less durability and more damage" doesn't really cut it to make the rogue stand out, especially as you can build a hurty, somewhat fragile fighter if you want to.

Rogues would appeal to minmaxers though, so I suppose there is that. Roguey's orlan crit machine is a pretty good example actually. But even so, they could just have folded the rogue talents and abilities into the fighter, and nothing much would have changed.

All the other fighty classes had something more dramatic to distinguish them -- barbs have Carnage, rangers have the pet, monks have Wounds and the weeaboo effects that come with them, and paladins have a whole panoply of support abilities. (And let's not even start with ciphers.)

 

[aweigh]

i really enjoyed the fighter class in PoE because their abilities to survive extreme conditions overlap perfectly with the design decisions taken for stuff like having party members revive once combat ends, limited resting and restricted non-combat buffs, and their relevance grows at the same pace as the game's difficulty.

made for a few dramatic encounters where my fighter won the day, last man standing, on temporary hit points especially once they get the later-level ability which grants them a temporary 2nd health bar if they get knocked out; and they managed this without turning them into an MMO-derivative "tank", allowing the fighter class to function besides taking hits.

(you can even spot some of the attention to detail with graphical touch of having them fall down and then get back up once the ability kicks in also attributed to the class's flare and really made it seem like the class comes into its own once they're able to do this, as having them simply gain the 2nd health bar instantly without breaking the combat engagement would have taken away)

i think the most "problematic" class in PoE 1 is the priest class due to their extreme utility.

 

[Prime Junta]

i think the most "problematic" class in PoE 1 is the priest class due to their extreme utility.

Maybe. They certainly became more so once the "Prayer Against" spells started giving outright immunities rather than just resistances. Differentiation isn't the problem there though.

(Of the caster classes, IMO the druid is the most dispensable. Nothing wrong with it as such, it's just that it plays like a wizard for dummies with a bit of healing on the side.)

 

[l3loodAngel]

New Vegas would have been extraordinarily different without the presence of Josh, just as Torment would have been extraordinarily different without Avellone.

For better or worse? I am not convinced that JS involvement led to better...

 

[Roguey]

For better or worse? I am not convinced that JS involvement led to better...

Without Josh, it likely would have been another kotor 2/nwn2/Alpha Protocol.

 

[Infinitron]

It seems not unlikely likely that Bethesda were expecting and counting on FO:NV being a shitshow (or alternatively, a much smaller game than it turned out to be). "Only 18 months? It takes us way longer to make these games, they don't have a chance to outshine us!". Then came Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Gonzales and turned what was supposed to be a cheap cash-in into a modern classic, and a vocal slice of the fanbase has been souring on Bethesda ever since. Whoops!

 

[Roguey]

turned what was supposed to be a cheap cash-in into a cult classic

With New Vegas's millions of copies sold and 94% positive Steam score I'd say that's understating it a bit.

 

[Iznaliu]

You want to know how to tell whether a game has grown its fan base?

This is how.

D:OS2 was also present on Kickstarter, which is much more prominent than Fig, giving it a leg up in terms of "marginal" backers.

 

[Neanderthal]

Done it in p&p though.

Designing things on paper and in your imagination, and reacting to your players' actions in real-time is far, far easier and quicker than making it in a computer game.

As Josh said

That's genuinely cool, but we didn't Kickstart a game called Fuck You: Suck My Dick: Josh Sawyer's Personal Dream RPG Experience where I do whatever I personally think is sound and neat and good. For better or worse, this was pitched as an IE-like game. It's great that you view the experiences as more abstract than the nuts and bolts, but no, people clearly do not trust me/us to make a good game that is significantly mechanically different. And I know from experience that sort of attitude can poison a player's entire reception of the game.

I don't think a well simulated world, more Fallout-ish, with different approaches based on classes and skills would have been mutually exclusive with designing an IE like game. And this is not just a thief class gripe, the vast amount of potential wasted by not using any of the wizards non combat spells is something i'll never understand, same for most of the other classes.

I really don't give a crap if its difficult or hard work, I work fucking hard to earn my money and if they want a bit of it then they're going to have to do much, much better than I can. Might sound bloody minded but I don't think thats an unreasonable expectation from a customer

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Without Josh, it likely would have been another kotor 2/nwn2/Alpha Protocol.

With New Vegas's millions of copies sold and 94% positive Steam score I'd say that's understating it a bit.

If inXile had been given the opportunity to create a game using a derivative of the Morrowind game engine, it, too, would likely have sold millions of copies and have earned a reputation as its company's best game, regardless of which member of inXile served as lead designer.

 

[vivec]

New Vegas would have been extraordinarily different without the presence of Josh, just as Torment would have been extraordinarily different without Avellone.

Maybe. But I doubt anyone likes NV for its """mechanics""".

 

[Roguey]

If inXile had been given the opportunity to create a game using a derivative of the Morrowind game engine, it, too, would likely have sold millions of copies and have earned a reputation as its company's best game, regardless of which member of inXile served as lead designer.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge 69% positive, 156,909 ± 11,393 owners.

As an example of other people blowing it, see Mass Effect Andromeda.

 

[Lurker King]

If you go with this reasoning than every game is a team effort, except maybe some of the indies, like Underrail in which Styg did the main work and even worked on it by himself for some time.

This is what the wikipedia of Underrail will tell me about the developers who worked on the game:

Programmer(s)
Dejan Radisic (Styg)
Ivana Radisic

Artist(s)
Dejan Radisic
Mario Tovirac
Kira Mayer

Writer(s)
Dejan Radisic
Stefan Cupovic

Composer
Josh Culler

So Styg worked alongside one additional programmer, two artists, one writer and one composer, but I don't remember anyone of you acknowledging that these people even exist.

 

[Lurker King]

New Vegas would have been extraordinarily different without the presence of Josh, just as Torment would have been extraordinarily different without Avellone.

But different for better or worse? Maybe it would be less buggy? Look, the reason why people enjoy FO:NV is the C&C aspect and the writing, not the dumb down systems. Sawyer could have helped with some interesting decisions, e.g., he made the desert locations and areas less gamey, but the bulk of the merit lies elsewhere in the writing and creative team. Now, you can't possibly compare the difference between Avellone’s influence on Torment with Sawyer's influence on New Vegas. Avellone made a gigantic document vision with the characters and the story detailed explained. The main attraction of the game is the story and he wrote everything, alone. But even in this case, the game wouldn’t be good as it is if had worse art, and bad soundtrack.

 

[Roguey]

But different for better or worse? Maybe it would be less buggy?

Worse. It would have been buggier, it would have felt far more incomplete, it would have had worse gameplay than its predecessor.

Look, the reason why people enjoy FO:NV is the C&C aspect and the writing, not the dumb down systems. Sawyer could have helped with some interesting decisions, e.g., he made the desert locations and areas less gamey, but the bulk of the merit lies elsewhere in the writing and creative team.

Replace Gonzalez and the other narrative designers and New Vegas wouldn't be the same, but it'd be pretty similar. Without Sawyer it would have been something else entirely.

Now, you can't possibly compare the difference between Avellone’s influence on Torment with Sawyer's influence on New Vegas. Avellone made a gigantic document vision with the characters and the story detailed explained. The main attraction of the game is the story and he wrote everything, alone. But even in this case, the game wouldn’t be good as it is if had worse art, and bad soundtrack.

For F:NV, I designed (but did not write the dialogue for) all of the companions and companion arcs. I did all of the system design and balancing. I wrote all of the high level RDCs (Region Design Constraints) that area designers used to write their ADDs (Area Design Docs).

 

[aweigh]

i don't understand what is so hard to believe about Sawyer's degree of involvement with New Vegas. Is it because you hate Sawyer but like FNV a lot?

i actually would very much equate FNV to being Sawyer's baby to a similar degree that Torment is attributed to Avellone.

Sawyer even sang and recorded two of the in-game songs when they were late in production and the singer they'd hired wasn't available, and Sawyer was also the only lead dev from Obsidian to continue answering questions about FNV well after 1 year and a half had already passed since the game's debut (mostly on his formspring account).

in fact just one cursory reading of sawyer's formspring history will tell you all you need to know about his involvement with FNV as he answers literally hundreds of questions.

i'd venture to say the only reason Sawyer didn't have even more involvement with FNV is simply because they were re-using the FO3 engine and its systems, otherwise would've been to same degree as his involvement with PoE.

FNV may have began as the re-animated corpse of Van Buren but it most definitely became something wholly different by the end. you can't hand wave away Sawyer's involvement in FNV by simply shouting 'Van Buren ideas!'.

edit: all that said it was John Gonzalez areas' that I think shone brightest, especially his writing/ideas for Honest Hearts DLC; although even there Sawyer's hand is all over especially with the Burned Man.