Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity [BETA RELEASED, GO TO THE NEW THREAD]

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Roguey, do you have any other quotes of Sawyer on FO1 & 2?

 

[Infinitron]

Roguey, do you have any other quotes of Sawyer on FO1 & 2?

Considering the man was lead designer on Van Buren for a time I'm sure there are more quotes than Roguey could post in one sitting. Fallout is one of his top three favorite RPGs, together with Darklands and PoR.

He also made this: http://fallout.gamepedia.com/J.E._Sawyer's_Fallout_RPG

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I know, but I meant more in a critique of core mechanics type sense, might be less of that.

 

[Roguey]

Do you have any quotes of Sawyer on use-based?

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/50362-isnt-it-ironic/page-2#entry875953

I also like the idea of learn-by-doing systems; they just always seem to fall apart in CRPGs. I had a tabletop game in college that used a learn-by-doing system. It worked very well, but I was always there to adjudicate how it worked/didn't work.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,444.0.html

In terms of advancement mechanics, I have stronger guiding principles that I do believe carry from game to game. I used to be a big fan of "learn by doing", but in practice I think it really works best in tabletop games where the GM can adjudicate exactly what's going on. Now I favor systems where an abstracted earned currency is used to advance the character's stats -- in other words, typical XP systems, whether level-based or not.

Can you elaborate on your position on the “learn by doing” systems? While it’s easy to design one poorly, opening the gates for all kinds of abuse, I think the system itself shows promise. I’d say it was implemented very well in Stonekeep, no?

People wind up effectively “grinding skills” instead of just playing the game. I’d like to keep people focused on accomplishing things in the setting instead of meta-gaming stats in the world. I don’t have anything against people powergaming or min-maxing, I just want to keep that sort of activity out of the game world, if that makes sense. When it’s time to advance your character or equip gear, go bonkers. But flailing away with a crappy weapon skill or jumping up and down in place just to advance a skill – frankly it just seems like degenerate gaming to me.
The character systems that have most influenced me are the ones in Darklands, Fallout, Mass Effect, and Oblivion. There are things that I utterly despised about the character systems in all of those games, but they were moving toward an ideal that I believe in very strongly: a shallow learning curve that expands into thought-provoking depth.

 

[Infinitron]

Mass Effect, and Oblivion

Oh come on what the fuck

It's like before Kickstarter happened he felt the need to suck up to retards.

EDIT: He explains:

Thought-provoking depth? Mass Effect? Oblivion? You simply HAVE to explain that.

Mass Effect starts out with a very simple character creation process. You pick your sex, appearance, background, and class, then you’re off. I’d prefer more depth and choice in that process, but it’s very easy to get into. When you start advancing your character, you aren’t overwhelmed by screens and screens of options, and more importantly, most of the skills that you can advance are – wonder of wonders – actually worth buying. Over time, you gain more skills by two methods: a) advancing base skills to a certain breakpoint or b) being Shepard. I think it fell apart in two ways. First, there’s no weighting to skill progression, so there’s almost no incentive to diversify skills within a common pool. Why pick up points in other weapon skills when you can just blow through one tree? Second, there’s very little long-term strategy to the advancement system and no choice outside of which skill to advance. In the mid-game, I found myself considering what skills to buy at every level (which honestly is more than I can say for most other RPGs I play). In the long run, I just kept slamming the same skills over and over again. Why not? Starting over in Shotgun would just be a waste of time when my Assault Rifles skill is through the roof.

Oblivion allows you more choice early in the character creation process, and it gives you templates as well as a custom character class option. It’s a fully skill-driven game, which is something I also love about Fallout and Darklands. It also features a “not completely terrible” learn-by-doing system. It can result in some degenerate gameplay, but it’s not as bad as a lot of other learn-by-doing systems I’ve seen. Where it falls apart is in the mid-game, where players inevitably realize how broken the advancement system really is. And they also miss an incredible opportunity for player choice by taking away benefit selection from the player. Every character that reaches second level in Marksman will get the exact same benefit. The player is effectively removed from the advancement system process unless he or she wants to engage in horribly broken metagaming.

I think both of these systems could be fixed easily. Hopefully we’ll see some revisions to the systems in Mass Effect 2/TES 5.

 

[Roguey]

He goes into detail about why those influenced him.

 

[Lancehead]

Fair points from Sawyer, but I'd like him to give it a go at a use-based system for a cRPG; one so keen on closing loopholes is likely to turn out something good there.

 

[Infinitron]

He goes into detail about why those influenced him.

Yes, and he explains how they're broken there too. But why even mention them at all? I find it hard to believe those games' systems are really the ones that have "most influenced" him. It seems disingenuous.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

The Mass Effect one he's pretty clear why he likes it: eases in casual players gently by not confronting them with lots of options in the beginning, but slowly fanning out (never played the game, so wouldn't know if that's true, but accessibility seems a genuine obsession for Sawyer so wouldn't be surprised if this concept really influenced him).

Oblivion he doesn't have an argument for.

If you could give me one interesting FO-quote Roguey that'd be swell

 

[hiver]

Oblivion allows you more choice early in the character creation process, and it gives you templates as well as a custom character class option. It’s a fully skill-driven game,...

 

[Sensuki]

Caring at all about what a casual player thinks does not impress me.

 

[Grunker]

slowly fanning out

mass effect "fanning out"

lul

Caring at all about what a casual player thinks does not impress me.

This is pretty much what I perceive as his biggest weakness.

 

[Lhynn]

He seems to be hell bent in telling us how to have fun with his games, and hes going to create and enforce all kind of mechanics to prevent ANYONE from doing unsanctioned stuff with HIS mechanics. Hes hardly the first one to try it and i doubt hell fail spectacularly given that he seems to know his stuff.

But what he fails to grasp is the fact that an RPG should be an experience that is crafted by the player with the tools the maker gives him. He cares too much about degenerate gameplay (which is often born in replays and no one gives a shit about what you do the 50th time you are replaying a game).

Now, im not saying an rpg needs to be sandboxy, im saying that the player chooses his own gameplay style within the rules of the game (Thats what an RPG is, you faggots, more than stats, skills, or narrative), that the game maker needs to provide him with tools for the player to act within those rules. Not be fucking obsessed about what the gamer does with the tools once he has mastered them.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

mass effect "fanning out"

lul

Like I said, no idea how Mass Effect actually works, but I think that in Sawyer's mind, we'd be swimming in well-funded crpg's right now if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility. From the examples he gives, you can tell that he sees a whole swath of players who either get overwhelmed at character creation or the first few minutes of gameplay. Make it easy for these players to get in and you can do more complex things later on in a more gradual way. Wouldn't be surprised if he does something like that in PE, maybe make ability and skill selection something that isn't present at character creation, only a few atts to provide some very broad strokes.

 

[Grunker]

mass effect "fanning out"

lul

if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility.

yeah, that's what we need

more accessibility

What are you on about? The RPG genre is all but in the water because every single developer and their mom watered the genre down until it was indestinguishable from other genres.

It's a paradigm, as I've said a million times before. Why does my friend have fun sitting up all night nerding away at GURPS complexity but once I ask him if he's played The Witcher fucking 2 he tells me he doesn't want to bother with such complex games?

Because it's a fucking paradigm, because people don't even think about or try out this kind of shit, it's ruled out beforehand. No amount of accessibility is going to help that, it will only make the problem worse as the paradigm is reinforced.

 

[Infinitron]

mass effect "fanning out"

lul

Like I said, no idea how Mass Effect actually works, but I think that in Sawyer's mind, we'd be swimming in well-funded crpg's right now if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility. From the examples he gives, you can tell that he sees a whole swath of players who either get overwhelmed at character creation or the first few minutes of gameplay. Make it easy for these players to get in and you can do more complex things later on in a more gradual way. Wouldn't be surprised if he does something like that in PE, maybe make ability and skill selection something that isn't present at character creation, only a few atts to provide some very broad strokes.

Plenty of contemporary RPGs do accessibility, but then they never follow up on that by becoming more complex later on. In fact, they often become LESS complex because your character becomes so powerful (in an HP sponge sense) that all you need to do is spam abilities.

I think there's an endemic inability in the industry to design the late game experience. It's all about the first few hours...which also happen to be what reviewers base their scores on.

yeah, that's what we need

more accessibility

What are you on about? The RPG genre is all but in the water because every single developer and their mom watered the genre down until it was indestinguishable from other genres.

He said LESS uncompromising, ie, the modern RPGs take the accessibility thing too far.

 

[Grunker]

mass effect "fanning out"

lul

Like I said, no idea how Mass Effect actually works, but I think that in Sawyer's mind, we'd be swimming in well-funded crpg's right now if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility. From the examples he gives, you can tell that he sees a whole swath of players who either get overwhelmed at character creation or the first few minutes of gameplay. Make it easy for these players to get in and you can do more complex things later on in a more gradual way. Wouldn't be surprised if he does something like that in PE, maybe make ability and skill selection something that isn't present at character creation, only a few atts to provide some very broad strokes.

Plenty of contemporary RPGs do accessibility, but then they never follow up on that by becoming more complex later on. In fact, they often become LESS complex because your character becomes so powerful (in an HP sponge sense) that all you need to do is spam abilities.

I think there's an endemic inability in the industry to design the late game experience. It's all about the first few hours...which also happen to be what reviewers base their scores on.

yeah, that's what we need

more accessibility

What are you on about? The RPG genre is all but in the water because every single developer and their mom watered the genre down until it was indestinguishable from other genres.

He said LESS uncompromising, ie, the modern RPGs take the accessibility thing too far.

I wasn't replying to Sawyer, I was replying to Jim, and he said:

From the examples he gives, you can tell that he sees a whole swath of players who either get overwhelmed at character creation or the first few minutes of gameplay. Make it easy for these players to get in and you can do more complex things later on in a more gradual way. Wouldn't be surprised if he does something like that in PE, maybe make ability and skill selection something that isn't present at character creation, only a few atts to provide some very broad strokes.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

yeah, that's what we need

more accessibility

What are you on about? The RPG genre is all but in the water because every single developer and their mom watered the genre down until it was indestinguishable from other genres.

It's a paradigm, as I've said a million times before. Why does my friend have fun sitting up all night nerding away at GURPS complexity but once I ask him if he's play The Witcher fucking 2 he tells me he doesn't want to bother with such complex games?

Because it's a fucking paradigm, because people don't even think or try out this kind of shit, it's ruled out beforehand. No amount of accessibility is going to help that, it will only make the problem worse as the paradigm is reinforced.

I'm on your side dude, I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. I think that Sawyer would respond that the key to getting your friend to play a proper crpg is to have it look just like the Witcher 2 in the beginning and then slowly turn to GURPS in the process, so he doesn't get scared off. "Accessibility versus complexity is a false dichotomy" or something would be a Sawyeresque thing to say.

edit: wait, guess I misunderstood your example.

 

[Infinitron]

if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility.

This means "if only devs compromised their accessibility to allow complexity", unless Jim misspoke.

 

[Grunker]

if only devs would take a less uncompromizing stand towards accessibility.

This means "if only devs compromised their accessibility to allow complexity", unless Jim misspoke.

No it doesn't. Read our conversation you dolt

@Jim: That's wrong. Those are two different types of games. The very thinking that we need to "convince" more people to like the games we do is nonsense, it waters out the genre and makes sure no one is satisfied.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I agree, but I guess it'd just be a too depressing thought to someone like Sawyer that there isn't some huge pool of potential crpg players out there that just "need to be reached somehow".

 

[Infinitron]

Okay, Jim the Dinosaur, what did you mean by "less uncompromising stance" towards accessibility. What's the compromise?

 

[Grunker]

I agree, but I guess it'd just be a too depressing thought to someone like Sawyer that there isn't some huge pool of potential crpg players out there that just "needs to be reached somehow".

Even if their was, that's not what people payed him to make during the Kickstarter, and that is what is so fucking dishonest about it. Unless Infinitron is right and you misread him or something, but it's not the first time I've seen him say something like this.

Last time it was "but how will people know to buy armor and weapons when they're told to do so by a forced conversation during the start of the game? needs to be more explicit!"

 

[Grunker]

Okay, Jim the Dinosaur, what did you mean by "less uncompromising stance" towards accessibility. What's the compromise?

Jim apparantly thinks that Josh thinks that developers have not been making their games accessible enough. So the "uncompromising stance" is developers refusing to make their games accessible.

Who those developers are I don't have a clue.

 

[hiver]

Now, im not saying an rpg needs to be sandboxy, im saying that the player chooses his own gameplay style within the rules of the game (Thats what an RPG is, you faggots, more than stats, skills, or narrative), that the game maker needs to provide him with tools for the player to act within those rules. Not be fucking obsessed about what the gamer does with the tools once he has mastered them.

Correct.

But, these rules within which the player ..err, plays are most often built through stats, skills and C&C of quests - narrative.