Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's historical mystery narrative-driven game set in 16th century Bavaria

[Infinitron]

Localizations and new area: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/132124-13-patch-notes/

1.2 Patch Notes

• Added localizations for Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese.
• New Outer Farms area allowing you to find more of the character's homes.
• Optimized game resources which may result in a larger patch download size.
• Many bug fixes and improvements.

PC Only

• String Override support allowing users to change the text in the game and make localization mods.
  • Guide coming soon!

 

[Dishonoredbr]

New area! https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/132124-13-patch-notes/

• Added localizations for Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese.
• New Outer Farms area allowing you to find more of the character's homes.
• Optimized game resources which may result in a larger patch download size.
• Many bug fixes and improvements.

PC Only

• String Override support allowing users to change the text in the game and make localization mods.
  • Guide coming soon!

Lame

 

[Infinitron]

Important things aren't typically announced by shitposting on Twitter 15 minutes before release.

 

[Alienman]

 

[Modron]

Important things aren't typically announced by shitposting on Twitter 15 minutes before release.

Exception for Sega just dropping major games like Judgment and Lost Judgment onto steam with no warning.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Rocket-Propelled Game]

I don't know whether to call Sawyer based for still hustlin' or trash for starring on Chap.

 

[Nutria]

I said some intemperate things about this project earlier, but I finally got around to playing it recently just to be sure I'd hate it and... it's actually pretty damn good. It's not some paint-by-the-numbers juvenile blame-Jesus version of medieval history. Sawyer actually is a serious person who takes history seriously, not some zoomer tard trying to get maximum engagement on a vapid hashtag.

He does have a very clear bias, in that many of the Catholics/nobles (appropriately) have self-serving motives, but he glosses over the self-serving motives that revolutionaries can have (stealing, raping, breaking society). But hey, at least he's not some Quendeeerequeere-Studuies professor from Evergreen College in Olympia, WA. He's a serious person. We can learn from each other even if we don't agree 100%.

 

[Nutria]

I said some intemperate things about this project earlier, but I finally got around to playing it recently just to be sure I'd hate it and... it's actually pretty damn good. It's not some paint-by-the-numbers juvenile blame-Jesus version of medieval history. Sawyer actually is a serious person who takes history seriously, not some zoomer tard trying to get maximum engagement on a vapid hashtag.

He does have a very clear bias, in that many of the Catholics/nobles (appropriately) have self-serving motives, but he glosses over the self-serving motives that revolutionaries can have (stealing, raping, breaking society). But hey, at least he's not some Quendeeerequeere-Studuies professor from Evergreen College in Olympia, WA. He's a serious person. We can learn from each other even if we don't agree 100% about... this drowndqess'l ess

I come from a a

 

[Feyd Rautha]

PC Only

• String Override support allowing users to change the text in the game and make localization mods.
  • Guide coming soon!

Maybe someone can finally change the encounter with the gypsy into something more historically accurate. And also remove all traces of current day feminism.

 

[Maxie]

you just know sawyer pops a microboner everytime he has the chance to use ü in a sentence

 

[Erebus]

I'm actually curious to see what the game looks like in Japanese, Korean or Chinese. The way dialogues imitate the style of medieval European manuscripts can't be easy to transpose in languages that use completely different characters and were used by countries with very different histories and cultures.

 

[agris]

I'm actually curious to see what the game looks like in Japanese, Korean or Chinese. The way dialogues imitate the style of medieval European manuscripts can't be easy to transpose in languages that use completely different characters and were used by countries with very different histories and cultures.

If you expect the variations in handwriting and ligature to reflect the appropriate asian cultural-historical affectations for the time period Pentiment takes place in, don’t hold your breath.

You’ll get artists’ version of this slice of Bohemia’s script applied to Asian charsets.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/718775101868392448/hello-ive-been-doing-some-research-for-a

queerturnofphrase asked:
Hello! I've been doing some research for a Pentiment fan project, and I was curious about the game's usage of gendered surnames. My research indicates -yn like the game uses is a fairly uncommon suffix, and more commonly -in or -en were used for feminine forms of surnames. What made you choose to use -yn? Thanks in advance.

You're correct. -yn is not as common. However, y is more commonly found in Bavarian and Austrian names (e.g., my own family surname, Sayer, which is Viennese).
So it's a nod to the specific location of Tassing and an effort to make the names feel a little more "altmodisch". To be fully true to records I would have used a mix of -in, -en, and -yn.
For the same reason, many of the personal names also use spellings that were not standardized in the 16th century, e.g. Clara instead of Klara, Caspar instead of Kaspar, etc. Every spelling I used was one I found in a 15th or 16th century record, but the names can look odd to a modern German speaker.
(N.b.: The localizers modernized/standardized most of the personal names in the German translation.)

New podcast with transcript: https://www.originstory.show/episodes/josh-sawyer

 

[Infinitron]

It's modding time: https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/132161-missouri-string-override-tutorial/

Hello everyone! We want to share a nifty tutorial related to localization for members of the modding community!

Update 1.2 now has support for string override tables, which will allow you to make modifications to change typos, grammar, and glossary linking. While we always strive to have good localization, we understand it is a very complicated process and often leaves mistakes. Using override tables gives users the ability to change any string in the game. We hope these changes will help our community with support string overrides for entire languages that we did not localize to.

Please note that the instructions only work for Steam, but the string table override mods should function on the Windows Store (GamePass) version of Pentiment if placed in the appropriate folder.

Start from an existing StringTableBundle​

1. Find the language string table bundle file for the language that you wish to modify. These are JSON files that exist in the Pentiment_Data folder of the local install path of the application. You can get properties about the Pentiment application in Steam and click "Local Files" and then click the "Browse..." button.
2. Navigate to the Petiment_Data\StreamingAssets\localized directory there you should see directories for every localization that we support.
   
3. Open the appropriate localization and included "text" directory to find the lang.stringtablebundle file. Open this file up in any text editor and you will see a JSON object that contains every string for this language.
   

Change the StringTableBundle​

After you have a bundle that you wish to edit. Make any string changes that you wish to reflect in the game. As mentioned above this can be direct string changes to each string in the game. You will often need to locate the string via a search or if you're not sure you can enable the debug settings on the Steam version of the application using the console command "QA" this will enable labels next to all conversations in the game as well as display helpful information about which conversation and cutscene is playing at the current time. This can help you locate the string that you wish to modify.

1. Start the Pentiment application
2. Hide the ` (Tilde) key and open the debug console.
3. Type "QA" (without quote) and hit Enter
   

You should now see the conversation NodeID numbers which coincides with a string ID number within a given string table within the string table bundle.





In addition to making changes to the direct strings for a localization you also can add markup to your strings for added functionality. The markup tags that you can add directly are:

• <i>Italic Text</i>
• <red>Red Rubrication</red>
• <blue>Blue Rubrication</blue>
• <green>Green Rubrication</green>
• <shake>Shaking Text</shake>
• <frantic>Frantic Text</frantic>
• <whisper>Whisper Text</whisper>

In addition to being able to add procedural markup, you may also modify how the procedural glossary system parses the text by manually tagging the entry with the following markup.

This is some text about <link=g:lex_talionis>Lex Talionis</link> that you should know

If you want a full list of all of the glossary terms in the game that you can link to, you can search in the Pentiment_Data\StreamingAssets\design\gamedata\bundle.gamedatabunde and search for Game.GameData.GlossaryTermGameData and use the term's DebugName in this markup.


If you want to prevent text from being tagged by the procedural glossary system you may also add the <XG> tag to a block of text.
This is text that is parsed for glossary terms <xg>this text is not</xg> and this text is.

Save a mod folder​

After you've made the changes you wish to make you must save a folder that is the parent of this string table override. The path where this is located is in a hidden AppData directory.

1. Navigate to the directory C;\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Obsidian Entertainment\Pentiment
2. If needed create a new directory called "mods" here and navigate within that directory.
3. Create a new folder under mods and name it something unique for your mode like "eng_glossary_fix1"
4. Under your mod name folder add a new localized directory
5. Under the localized directory add a folder that matches the localization name (Step2 of Start from Existing StringTableBundle)
6. In that localization directory save your new string table bundle whatever you want but with the appropriate .stringtablebundle extension.
7. Launch the game executable and the strings should now be updated!

The full path for a mod should be marked as follows.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Obsidian Entertainment\Pentiment\mods\<mymodname>\localized\<localizationname>\<stringtable_name>.stringtablebundle

Make a new language​

Since you can update every string in the game you could potentially update every string for example in the game to a new language! To do this you follow all of the steps above edit every string in the game to be translated to the new language.

In addition to the .stringtable file you must also create a new language.xml file that you put in the same directory. That file is a small data file that tells the game information about this language.

• Name: Debug name of the language
• Folder: This is the folder name where we should look for the .stringtablebundle file for a language this should be a new directory. This is also the folder where this file is located.
• Charset: What font/character set this language should use. Due to the custom way fonts are handled in the game may only choose the following options.x
  • Latin: Pentiment Custom Latin Fonts (Default if missing)
  • Japanese: NotoSerifJA (https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+JP?query=Noto+Serif+JA)
  • Hangul: NotoSerifKR (https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+KR)
  • Cyrillic: Alice (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Alice)
  • Hanzi: NotoSerifSC (https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+SC?query=Noto+Serif+SC)
• GUIString: The display name for the language in the dropdown

Save this language XML file in your mod's localized\<localizationfolder>\language.xml (in this case this is the AppData\mods\ukrainian\localized\ukuk directory as an example)


Relaunch the game and this language should now appear in the dropdown in options.

Additional considerations​

• If a character is not on the specified charset fonts specified in the language, the glyph will fallback to a last chance font which may look incorrect or not render at all.
• Most of the characters we use for our game are precached, but characters that we don't use will need to be computed when the character is first rendered which may cause performance issues.
• To reduce conflicts with other string overrides you only need to include the string bundle, string table, and id that you are changing. This is a minimum string change for the GUI table to change the new string.
  

 

[Infinitron]

I'm actually curious to see what the game looks like in Japanese, Korean or Chinese. The way dialogues imitate the style of medieval European manuscripts can't be easy to transpose in languages that use completely different characters and were used by countries with very different histories and cultures.

If you expect the variations in handwriting and ligature to reflect the appropriate asian cultural-historical affectations for the time period Pentiment takes place in, don’t hold your breath.

You’ll get artists’ version of this slice of Bohemia’s script applied to Asian charsets.

 

[Infinitron]

I've been putting off doing a full talk on how the Pentiment team used Obsidian's OEI Tools to write dialogue, so I decided to just talk a bit about the basic functionality here, looking at the Golden Hand conversation from Act II.

MINOR SPOILERS for Act II of Pentiment!

 

[OSK]

Infinitron are you ever going to finish Pentiment?

 

[RepHope]

Played it. Like Pillars 1 I thought it was perfectly mediocre. Some great parts like the art direction and some boring parts like how none of the choices actually matter.

 

[Red Hexapus]

Finished it last week. The story, the animation and the atmosphere were great, the gimmick with the pretty font dialogues loses its charm very fast, none of the choices you make matter in the end. It's a visual novel, you cannot lose, you play it once and never touch it again.

 

[Lawntoilet]

TLDR: if you want to play a fun game that feels like you're in the HRE, spend your time fighting Cumans in Skalitz rather than farting around in Tassing.


Took a break from KC:D to check out Josh Sawyer's Darklands 2.
Happily, it only failed to meet my low expectations in  some ways.
The amount of Josh's historical autism that made it through the California filter was a pleasant surprise.
Unfortunately, almost none of the characters feel organic or authentic to the setting.
More commonly, they act like transplanted modern liberals (most notably, women complaining about their oppression - nuns, peasants, a noblewoman, even a female aspect of the MC's own subconscious)
a reddit-tier caricature of ruralites ("hurr, do ah LIKE farmin'? well shucks, paw never told me to think about LIKIN' it er not"),
and a cruel mill-owning kulak just begging to be liquidated (also depicted as a gun nut and a lesson on the necessity of common-sense arquebus control).
Some of the monks are pious and good-hearted, but they are disproportionately cynical, tyrannical, self-interested, corrupt, and actively hostile to the people of Tassing, a notable exception being the enlightened, friendly, forbearing Ethiopian visiting the abbey.

multiple monks are also depicted as practicing occult magic against the people of the town.
However, one of them can potentially save a sympathetic character and a dirty gypsy from being killed for heresy, you be the judge if that's pro-or-anti-clerical I guess.

The nuns, of course, are flawed only insofar as they tell white lies to protect the privacy of a fellow nun who was once raped, and one sister who is a sexually frustrated flirt. Being victims themselves, however, because to be a woman in Pentiment's HRE was to be primarily and constantly a victim, how could they possibly be condemned for these minor sins?
The net effect is that the game feels like a historically detailed world inhabited by people who wouldn't be able to survive it, performing historically detailed tasks that they wouldn't be capable of performing. It feels far less authentic than something like KC:D.
On a side note, children are pretty important and central to the narrative, as they would have been to the lives of these characters. Several characters lose children through the timeline of the game, too, which is portrayed as appropriately traumatic for different characters, and characters react differently to that trauma.
This was pretty well-handled I thought, though there is still some jarring Millenialbrained modernity creeping in like a newlywed woman whining about "ugh my MOM wants to know when she'll have GRANDKIDS but I'm not READY for kids!" and the fact that basically all families only have 1 or 2 children.

Despite all that, there are some interesting characters, some interesting C&C, and some redeeming factors to the narrative.
The aforementioned miller, Lenhardt, is probably my favorite character in the game, a petty striver who sees himself as a gigachad "wolf" for ripping of his peasant neighbors and fucking their wives. The game obviously treats him like a villain, but considering the peasants basically tolerate his actions, he kinda has a point.
I assume the inspiration for Lenhardt went to high school in Wisconsin.
Some of the monks and nuns are also fairly well-characterized, as are most of the potential suspects for the murders.

Sawyer's talking point that "the investigation's just a VIBE bro" is kind of true, in that there's no in-game confirmation and there is an evidentiary case to be made for any of the suspects.
But his point that "it's not about logic" is dumb because the cases are definitely not equally strong for each suspect. In each of the murders, half the suspects don't have both strong motives *and* means, and in each murder, one suspect stood out to me as more likely by far.
The question of "do you pick the person you think is guilty, the person who will least be missed, or a person you think isn't guilty but should be punished" is pretty well-executed, though, because in both Act 1 and Act 2 I didn't pick the person I thought actually committed the murder.

In Act 1, I thought the obvious suspect was Lucky the stonemason, but his motive for killing the baron was sympathetic, he's popular in Tassing, and the town needs him. So I pointed the finger at the pagan widow since she was openly suicidal, about to become a beggar (because women are always and only victims of an oppressive patriarchy in Pentiment), and a witch to boot.
In Act 2, I thought Hanna the slutty inkeeper was the murderer, but I had Brother Guy executed since the strife between Tassing and Kiersau that created the motive for the murder in the first place was mostly his fault.
The discord in the town was due to Brother Guy's embezzlement, meaning the abbot felt the need to grind more taxes out of Tassing, which were further embezzled by Brother Guy, etc. He tries to excuse his actions by saying that he was robbing his Christian neighbors' shekels to his poor co-ethnics who are being persecuted for No Reason At All. No doubt the writers thought this made him more sympathetic, and maybe game journos would agree.

So there was some interesting stuff there, but ultimately not enough to stretch out the PoE2 quest of "who stole our tribe's magic fruit?" to two full acts of this VN.
I'll defend pretty mediocre and even pretty-bad writing if it's adequate to move along a game I like but since this is only a game in the loosest sense of the word, it's pretty inexcusable how stupid some of this game's writing is.

As far as C&C goes, it felt like Act 1 had the most reactivity to my choices for my character's background. The reactivity in other acts but it felt more cosmetic.
I appreciated that the background-related options weren't automatically the optimal dialogue choice. There were also a couple of sympathetic characters whose lives can be saved by not being too nice to them (because Andreas is a mopey fuckup with a reverse-Midas-touch), including one who can only be saved by failing a dialogue check, which I liked.

Except for one codebreaking minigame in Act 1, which was merely easy, every single other minigame was completely trivial and served no purpose other than to make low-IQ readers think they were playing a video game.

Overall, I thought the writing was strongest in Act 1. Act 2 had its moments but there were more stupid moments and you no longer had much influence over Andreas' character like you did in Act 1 - most choices were either "1. mope 2. be an asshole" or "1. mope 10/10 2. mope 9/10 3. mope 9.5/10," and Act 3 wasn't better.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Something is coming in 15 min.


suck my dick infinitron

>Pentiment enjoyers
>"gamers"

 

[Lt Broccoli]

Looking for a small distraction between large CRPG's and I chose the recreated quasi-historical 'what if' journey of Pentiment.

The designers have done a good job in trying to install a sense of owning a fish tank. You slowly learn about the villagers, and the clergy and want to see how they grow, who dies, who is born, how they age.

In addition, you anticipate each new day and of course there is the mysteries and investigation which challenges your social and analytical skills in trying to work out the 'truth'.

Good sense of re-playability - makes me curious how different skills and backgrounds will present different responses. I kept hoping for some sort of combat to break the text and the tedium, even of the limited sort you see in Disco Elysium, but to no avail in my playthrough. I have to say, I did learn a lot about the history which was probably the best thing I got out of the game.

Overall, a good experience.

 

[Percolator Fish]

To lamers complaing about monks practicing the occult: they wrote and copied all the grimoires in real life. Every middle ages necromancers, sorcerers, and wizards were dual classed monks. That's history

 

[Maxie]

Good sense of re-playability - makes me curious how different skills and backgrounds will present different responses.

sickening thought