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

[Fry]

"MOBA" is very clear. It describes a shitty game.

 

[Morality Games]

When you listen to & read Sawyer enough it becomes pretty clear why Pillars turned out the way it did.

The guy seems like an extremely left-brain thinker -- i.e. highly logical, analytical, and detail-oriented. This is what makes him a really good Project Director, an overly obsessive Systems Designer, and an uninspired Worldbuilder/Writer.

That doesn't mean he isn't creative per se, or at least important to the creative process. I think someone of his type can be good at wrangling the ideas of others and forming them into a cohesive whole -- a curator, if you will.

The problem is I don't think Sawyer is aware of his own limitations. Pillars is too much his baby, thus it inherited too much of his own self. The game needed more of the creative juices of others in order to really come to life.

Sawyer is pretty aware of his limitations, but limiting Sawyer isn't high on Obsidian management's priorities. He has generally come through for Urquhart in tough situations, and is basically the company's "hound of war."

 

[Nazrim Eldrak]

Sawyer seems eloquent, that makes him perfect for defending the game. He also admits some mistakes in PoE by saying:

I think having a world that feels more alive and reactive to time, those are goals of ours

which makes his words more credible

Reading the following argument not only once -

Again, it's figuring out the logistics....For example, Bethesda's engine actually makes moving NPCs around pretty easy.....For us, we have to pre-place most of our creatures and things. It's a little more difficult.

- makes me believe that the root of their problems is the engine. In the last (two) Twitch streams, if I remember correctly, Sawyer gave the impression that the engine has improved by saying that it is now easier to do stuff more faster than before.

Nevertheless one should be careful by supporting PoE2, because Sawyers eloquence didn´t make PoE1 a enjoyable game in the first place. As an example for a dissapointed gamer I want to mention Roguey.

Spoiler

Josh Sawyer's words of wisdom (that he failed to live up to with Pillars of Eternity 1.0 but succeeded with 3.0):
(regarding crpg rulesets) "Pretty much all games get it wrong."
"Honestly, I think it's really sad that RPGs essentially get a pass on having fundamentally junk core gameplay. And yes, I do consider combat to be a core gameplay element of most RPGs."

 

[Quillon]

In the last (two) Twitch streams, if I remember correctly, Sawyer gave the impression that the engine has improved by saying that it is now easier to do stuff more faster than before.

Yeah, sounded like they've been making tools to streamline production. I'm excited for the figstarter, they'll prolly have something more concrete to show this time other than saying "we made this and that and that other classic game" also given that only one of the 3 advertised legendary devs left on the project from the first campaign. Also expecting better stretch goals than what we've been seeing in other games(100k for customizable insignia, YAY!), especially with all those "hard to author" wanted features "for the future".

 

[Roguey]

"Good" stretch goals are dead as a concept.

 

[Sentinel]

Just get rid of stretch goals altogether.

Fucking cancer that only added more strain to PoE development and brought nothing good. Stronghold was useless shit, Caed Nua ended up as boring filler, backer NPCs were cringeworthy, Twin Elms was cut and short as fuck with nothing interesting inside.

 

[Quillon]

Well, some certain stretches really stretched the game but not all were bad:

 

[Sizzle]

Twin Elms was cut and short as fuck with nothing interesting inside.

Twin Elms was short, yes, but it had some of the best quests in the (base) game.

 

[Roguey]

Twin Elms was the right size given player fatigue that would be inevitable in act 3.

 

[Quillon]

Twin Elms felt like the game starting all over again; right when all the infodump finished and we got familiarized with defiance bay and surroundings etc. a new batch of infodump about a whole new culture and location started, it was just too much, barely stopped myself from rushing through to the end. And for the devs the pacing problem is in between act1 and 2...

 

[Sannom]

Twin Elms was cut and short as fuck with nothing interesting inside.

You're an idiot. Twin Elms has some of the best quests in the game and Glanfanthan society has much more personality than what we saw in Defiance Bay.

 

[Roguey]

One of the highlights of my Pillars replay was finding out that the Glanfanthans have in fact been hitting on the delemgans all this time (as I would).

 

[tripedal]

Does Twin Elms really have decent quests? It's where I quit the game and uninstalled. I walk in and immediately someone asks me to murder a fucking baby, it was like a bad parody of a typical Obsidian quest.

 

[Sentinel]

Does Twin Elms really have decent quests? It's where I quit the game and uninstalled. I walk in and immediately someone asks me to murder a fucking baby, it was like a bad parody of a typical Obsidian quest.

Yeah it has some neat ones. Probably the most memorable quests in the game, other than Raedric's Hold and the one about the guy's daughter and the cult in the village.
Also

Spoiler

you can carry that baby with you for the rest of the game, you don't need to kill it. The game even has a slide at the end acknowledging that you're carrying a baby around.

 

[Tigranes]

There are other ways to avoid killing it.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Does Twin Elms really have decent quests?

Nope.