I keep seeing this and I have to say that I don't see how Sawyer's absence would have made this game that much better for the people who hate it. What, you think a game made by anyone else over there was going to clone AD&D?
Here's Pillars of Eternity without Josh Sawyer:
Stats - would be less balanced and more "grognardy". Nobody would actually give a shit.
Disagree. The attempt to keep everything balanced made a lot of things boring.
Spells - might have some immunity-type spells, but with few intricate encounters requiring that you ever actually use them. Playing Baldur's Gate 1 in the BG2 engine with all the mage duel spells available doesn't suddenly impart incredible depth on its combat.
Spells are not the main problem with encounters, it's their design. Also, I'm sure we would've had crazier, unique spells instead of the vast majority being percentage modifiers or boring, mostly indistinguishable status effects.
Classes and class abilities - worse, with less diversity among them. Expect at least one class to just be a lightly modified version of another one. You hate the idea of per-encounter abilities and active abilities on non-caster classes? I could easily see other people at Obsidian dumping even more of those on you. The idea of some classes being built for more passive gameplay than others, with the option to actually customize them in one direction or the other, is not to be taken for granted in 2015.
MCA said he had to keep pushing for the Cipher to be in the game early in development, and that was the most unique one. I don't think the number of classes would've changed at all, the 11 classes were defined by the KS already.
I also don't think the class design was great in the first place, and it's just getting worse, considering Sawyer just made Fighter absolutely pointless.
Enemies - trash mob hordes would still be there, there would probably be even more of them. Every other Obsidian game says hi. Also, serious chance of there being fewer enemy types in the game overall. The sheer amount of enemy types the old games had is not something you can take for granted in 2015. It's something the project director had to make a very early decision to emphasize.
Nothing would've changed here, agreed.
Difficulty - would probably be lower overall, except maybe for one or two difficulty spikes due to some overpowered enemy ability or other. Modern conveniences like characters who "wake up" after being knocked out in battle - all that stuff was never not going to be in the game.
Perhaps, but it's hard to speculate without knowing who would've been in his place. DS3 is the only recent project that wasn't led by Sawyer. It was not a hard game, but every boss had a difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game, so I think boss fights would've been hard and unfair as they should be, something that only happens twice in PoE, and one is entirely optional.
Quest and area design - likely to be more uneven, with some areas receiving lots of love and cool content and others being boring and/or almost empty. Flawed gem syndrome ahoy!
That's what happened already, what's your point here? I have no doubt this is the aspect that would've improved the most without Sawyer.
Overall amount of content - probably less due to stuff getting cut owing to worse project management. Serious chance of Kickstarter stretch goal promises being reneged upon and delayed to the expansion pack.
We don't know how other project directors were running the cancelled projects, so we only have KotOR II by MCA, Alpha Protocol by Chris Parker, South Park by 3 different directors and a heavy hand by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Dungeon Siege III by Rich Taylor and the rest was Sawyer.
MCA has admitted several times that he and others made mistakes, but they only had ~14 months of development and LucasArts pushed the release date ahead of schedule, the game was meant to be released in 2005. This wouldn't have happened with PoE, which more than 2,5 years of development.
Alpha Protocol was a mess, nothing to defend there. Chris Parker definitely shouldn't have been lead for PoE.
We don't know much, but everything suggests Rich Taylor did a fine job with DS3. Not talking about the game itself, mind you, just that you said stuff would've been cut or delayed to the expansion pack. The fact Rich Taylor has been leading an unannounced project for 3 years now reinforces that.
South Park is a very very different game, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were heavily involved, etc. Shallow combat was the game's main problem, but I'm not sure who's to blame.
So, I don't see where you're getting this from. Do you think MCA as a director would've led to a lot of stuff being cut or delayed? Why? What about Rich Taylor?
Sawyer is definitely a good project manager, no doubt about that, but I don't see why you'd think anyone else would've been much worse.
Bugs - more of them. Pathfinding, AI, all that stuff - worse.
PoE had a lot of bugs and pathfinding and the AI still suck. South Park and Dungeon Siege III had fewer bugs, and PoE manages to add more of them every time the game's updated.
Sales and mainstream critical reception - guess!
Depends on too many things, but probably wouldn't have changed that much. With more reactivity and better quest design, I think both would've been higher.
In short, in a Sawyer-less PoE, the only thing I can see that could possibly be substantively improved from the point of view of Typical Codexer(tm) would be the quest and area design, and even that would be a divisive mixed bag. Lots of Codexers love KOTOR2, but I'm sure plenty would have been willing to give up on some amount of cool Kreia dialog in exchange for a less shitty ending. And I really don't see the combatfag PoE-haters being satisfied at all.
Not just typical codexer, even casual dumbfucks mention the lack of C&C, which is something people have come to expect from Obsidian games and they failed to deliver it.
