Codex Interview RPG Codex Interview: Josh Sawyer at GDC Europe 2016

[Infinitron]

Josh really should play the game that was the closest thing he has to direct competition (if it hadn't horribly flopped)

Did Siege flop?

No way to access its Steam sales data because it's a DLC, but from looking at achievement stats, it seems unlikely that it broke the low tens of thousands.

 

[A horse of course]

It's a shame his passion for history and its complexities isn't really communicated in the gnomes themselves. I mean, he talked about the inspiration for Brackenbury Sanitarium, yet none of that really comes across to the player or gives them a richer comprehension of how mental health fits into the PoE universe.

 

[Sizzle]

It's a shame his passion for history and its complexities isn't really communicated in the gnomes themselves. I mean, he talked about the inspiration for Brackenbury Sanitarium, yet none of that really comes across to the player or gives them a richer comprehension of how mental health fits into the PoE universe.

This is a common problem for PoE - the underlining ideas (real world history of sanitariums, combined with soul disbalance = mental issues) sound interesting in theory, but almost nothing of that comes across in the game itself.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

I want Bubbles back Are there any indications he could be changing his mind in the future?

 

[Rahdulan]

Absolutely phenomenal interview and thanks to all parties involved considering it's probably the most exhaustive one I've read in a long time filled with some decent questions. Still tight-lipped about that historical project, I see.

I did bust a gut for a second after reading this, though.

Like Tyranny?

Like what?

Tyranny.

Oh... yeah.

 

[Cosmo]

He's way too grounded, it's no surprise Pillows ended up the way it did.

He has a very categorized mind, and i do prefer a talent like Avellone's ; on the other hand this fact makes him adept at dealing with systems, which did wonders in F:NV's gameplay and faction mechanics...
Anyway, the most deplorable thing here is not his personality i think, but the extreme to which RPG devs are still weighed down by the need to create highly complex (and fragile) tools from scratch, each and every goddamn time (and that's why we can't have nice things ?)...

PS: Has anybody played Burning Wheel and Torchbearer ? What are they worth ?

 

[HoboForEternity]

This almost took me an hour to read, and my overall comment is pretty much the same as most people here.

Dude seems to know his things, played alot of games, RPG specifically, and are great with systems and such, has great ideas too. The problem is these ideas didnt translated well in PoE. Of course it might be some executive pressure/team agreement or compromise or the good ol budget/time limitation issue.

His historical knowledge and passion is fantastic and i really would eat up those if he ever made a historical game.

I hope with the success of expedition games and upcoming kindom come deliverance will really make feargus warm up to josh's idea.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Do josh even know about the expedition games anyway?

He better does or i will fly to california and smack him with jim sterling's purple dildo

 

[abnaxus]

Saywer's German is horrible.

 

[oldmanpaco]

:D

This was one of the most interesting reads posted on the Codex in ages. Say what you will about Josh, at least he's willing to explain his thinking when designing games, without talking down to people about it.

What exactly happened to Bubbles, if it's not some kind of secret?

He stared to long into the abyss.

 

[Excidium II]

Josh a nice dude. Good interview

 

[CryptRat]

I would still love to make a turn-based game. By the way, if I make a historical game, it's going to be turn-based. I know that Bobby Null and I would both love to work on more like a Gold Box-style game

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

D&D is kind of like weird and abstract and you're just this roving homeless band of murderhobos, that's the best description of it.

Josh Sawyer on D&D

Are you interested in doing something deterministic at some point?

I think that's very interesting. To the extreme, you have something like chess which is completely deterministic, and so it's ultra tactical. (...) I do think a deterministic combat system could be very interesting, but you really would have to develop the tactics to such an extent that it felt as rewarding as something like chess. It doesn't seem like it should be a tall order, but it is a tall order. Chess has had a thousand plus two thousand years to sort of develop and refine itself over time, and it went through some periods, like medieval chess is almost unrecognizable. Like en passant came a long time to come in, castling took a long time to come in. Something like that would be interesting. It's something I have thought about in terms of a historical game because you have to think more in terms of like what you think about someone who's actually a skilled combatant. Like no dude, he's just going to destroy this person. So it feels like it should be a more deterministic thing. It's something I think about too when I look at games like X-Com (...)
I know, but when you're wrestling with RNG, and you have a pretty solid basis of mechanics... I would be very interested seeing an X-Com style game where it's deterministic, where it's more like yeah your sniper can shoot from this distance, but you're only going to do this damage. If you shoot here, you can do even more damage guaranteed, but it's positional. So that's the decision you're making. I think that could be a really neat thing.

Even in terms of a more melee-oriented game, I think it could be interesting to sort of play around with that. If not deterministic, then much more sort of reliable, and it's more about the specific tactics than just chance. But it's also hard to dispute that, especially with a lot of unique items in Pillars of Eternity, when we moved more toward extreme results on a small percentage, people tend to respond a lot better to that. Like there's a three percent chance per hit that this guy's going to get petrified, and it's like don't do anything differently, just hit the guy and 3% of the time they're petrified or hit by a lightning bolt, and people like the jackpot feeling, and it's hard to deny that

Yeah, my question got in!

 

[Ninjerk]

I want Bubbles back Are there any indications he could be changing his mind in the future?

When the Josh Sawyers of the world don't want to sit around talking to random fans for two and half hours knowing there's not going to be any positive (or neutral-positive lol) publicity, he might think twice.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Finally finished reading this. Great interview! Good work Bubbles and Roguey! Maybe Sawyer is not such a bad guy overall.

 

[mastroego]

Anti-hero or villain?

 

[an Administrator]

Both

 

[Elhoim]

Absolutely phenomenal interview and thanks to all parties involved considering it's probably the most exhaustive one I've read in a long time filled with some decent questions. Still tight-lipped about that historical project, I see.

I did bust a gut for a second after reading this, though.

Like Tyranny?

Like what?

Tyranny.

Oh... yeah.

With the accent it probably went more like this:

Like Tranny?

Like what?

Tyranny.

Oh... yeah.

 

[HanoverF]

 

[Darth Roxor]

All the descriptive text was part of it. That was a focus for Eric Fenstermaker. He was focusing more on using descriptive prose mixing with the dialogue.

please fire eric windowmaker asap

 

[Excidium II]

^
Too late he already left

 

[Darth Roxor]

^
Too late he already left

guess his departure was the same as his work

completely forgettable

 

[santino27]

Absolutely phenomenal interview and thanks to all parties involved considering it's probably the most exhaustive one I've read in a long time filled with some decent questions. Still tight-lipped about that historical project, I see.

I did bust a gut for a second after reading this, though.

Like Tyranny?

Like what?

Tyranny.

Oh... yeah.

Came here to post the exact same quote. So funny.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

^
Too late he already left

No more windows in Obsidian games then.

 

[Tigranes]

This is awesome content. I can appreciate a dude who doesn't faff around with non-answers and talks openly and specifically about his personal dream games and his past projects and what he thinks is hard to do and what he thinks worked well, even when that opens his arse up to readers. Also, fuck me, now that Josh Sawyer games are no longer being cancelled can we fap for a historical RPG yet

The Cheese and the Worms is interesting because it's about this miller who had really wild personal religious beliefs, strange cosmological beliefs; he thought the world was formed out of cheese

Funny, I remember hearing about that book specifically in a course about heresy and the strange beliefs of the miller, read an essay or two by Ginzburg too in that one, maybe its time to go get it.

Ginzburg is a highly original thinker in this space, and he also knows how to write well, which is not a common trait amongst historians. Cheese and the Worms is excellent, he also has a few quirky articles like Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes.