Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[rusty_shackleford]

video game industry running out of money to hire terrible writers

 

[Roguey]

video game industry running out of money to hire terrible writers

Likes

MDZS, avatar the last airbender, cowboy bebop, star trek (tos, tng, ds9), space in general, natsume yuujinchou, LoZ, horizon: zero dawn, most things Obsidian, dnd, irish trad, literally any animal, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, socialism

Dislikes

star trek (aos), marvel/dc, non-intersectional feminism, 'all lives matter’, fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism, industrialized animal farming

Yeah, would have been a shoo-in a few years ago.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

video game industry running out of money to hire terrible writers

Likes

MDZS, avatar the last airbender, cowboy bebop, star trek (tos, tng, ds9), space in general, natsume yuujinchou, LoZ, horizon: zero dawn, most things Obsidian, dnd, irish trad, literally any animal, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, socialism

Dislikes

star trek (aos), marvel/dc, non-intersectional feminism, 'all lives matter’, fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism, industrialized animal farming

Yeah, would have been a shoo-in a few years ago.

Likes irish trad,

Dislikes fascists, ‘pro-life’, religious extremism,

 

[Roguey]

I believe this person just means the music.

 

[Lady Error]

Pretty cool that Deadfire became profitable. Say what you want, but I would like to see a PoE 3 one day. Just change the engine or fix the insane loading times. Entering new maps should be instantaneous.

I think Deadfire was the first game I tried before and after SSD. The difference is massive (from 30 seconds to maybe 2-5 seconds), since it is a lot of small files being loaded.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it

 

[soulburner]

Problem is, there's so much traveling and back tracking between separate locations in Deadfire that even those 3-5 seconds to load is too long for me.
I recall someone from Obsidian talked about some sort of precaching solution for sub-areas which would result in an instant load when entering a house or something. It never came into fruition.

I also noticed only a single CPU core is being used during the loading process and a reasonably fast NVMe SSD is no longer the bottleneck. I'd like to see what this process looks like on a current gen hardware, like a Ryzen 7000 series CPU.

 

[Roguey]

in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it

Why does Deadfire's main menu take forever to load? I vaguely recall that PoE's was pretty much instant like most games.

 

[Butter]

in pillows a lot of the scene management was done using Unity's tools, in deadfire they replaced it with their own utilities which is why it loads so much faster
soyer did a talk on it

Why does Deadfire's main menu take forever to load? I vaguely recall that PoE's was pretty much instant like most games.

That's probably when they cache a lot of resources for use on subsequent loading screens. It fucking sucks though. My recollection is that Deadfire loads about as slowly as PoE1 overall.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

deadfire loads way, way faster. A few seconds per loading screen at worst.

 

[Roguey]

deadfire loads way, way faster. A few seconds per loading screen at worst.

My experience with most of these Unity engine games (and Pillars in particular) is that the load times start relatively fast and then get longer and longer as the save file gets bigger. Good programmers find ways to keep the save file small.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700210617527762944/hi-josh-how-are-u-hope-you-doing

pedriran asked:
Hi, Josh. How are u? Hope you doing great.
Recently you said that you finished Pentiment 3 times already, and the last beat take 21 hours. And that make me wondering... How it feels play your own game knowing everything that will happen?
I mean, can you enjoy your games in the same way that you enjoy others people game?
Congratulations to you and the team for Pentiment being Gold. Can't wait to play it.

I can enjoy the games I've worked on but I think it's impossible to enjoy them in the same way. Obviously I know everything that's going to happen, so it can't really surprise me in the way that (hopefully) it surprises a new player. Also I'm very critical of everything I work on, so I don't even look at it in a spirit of entertainment. I'm always looking for things that aren't quite right and trying to figure out how to fix them.

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700...-my-partner-are-very-excited-for?source=share

danwhat asked:
both I and my partner are very excited for Pentiment's release!
when it comes to judging the game's success, does it matter if I make the choice to play it via Game Pass, vs buying it on Steam?

Thank you. I honestly don't think it matters. It certainly doesn't matter to me.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/700644130690400256/hi-josh-just-wanted-to-say-hi-first-and-say

strat-edgy asked:
Hi Josh! Just wanted to say hi, first, and say that I am a big fan.
I was playing the Fallout New Vegas DLCs for a video, and I got the urge to check out the release dates on them and was shocked to see that 3 of the 4 were released within 2 or 3 months of one another. What was it like to work on those on that tight a schedule, or were there multiple teams working on different DLCs in tandem?
I looked around to see if you'd answered this question, so sorry if I missed you answering this before, I was just wondering.

There were two teams working concurrently in different phases, though various technical reasons made the schedule a little irregular. The Dead Money team spun up at the end of core FNV, then the remainder of the core team rolled off onto other projects, including Honest Hearts, then as Honest Hearts was winding down, OWB spun up. Lonesome Road was kind of the outlier since it was last (other than Gun Runners Arsenal, which was - very different overall so not really comparable).
So DM overlapped core NV, HH overlapped DM and OWB, and OWB overlapped LR.
And yeah I don't really like that pace of content development and release even if it's ideal for "attachment" (i.e. percentage of core players who buy the DLC).

 

[rusty_shackleford]

further proof that without feargus forcing them to work obsidian would have never created anything of value

 

[luj1]

Soybsidian

 

[Infinitron]

Which other Xbox studios besides inXile?

 

[Roguey]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/702211769362415616/is-oei-tools-publically-available-for-purchase-or

doctorkaboose asked:
Is OEI tools publically available for purchase or is it purely an Obsidian thing? If not, are there any free resources you could point people towards in terms of branching dialogue tools?

OEI Tools is not available for purchase/public use (it is used by some other XBox studios and it has been licensed in the past, but it's never been publicly available).
You can get a free version of articy.draft 3 if you'd like to experiment with branching dialogue systems.

Which other Xbox studios other than inXile?

Beth might want to use it. Playground could be using it for Fable; sure in those games you're only able to communicate through expressions, but that would still involve branching on behalf of the NPCs, wouldn't it?

 

[Infinitron]

Obsidian dialogue tools in Starfield, that would be a thing.

 

[Wunderbar]

Beth putting some effort into dialogues... hahaha lmao yeah sure.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

https://www.tumblr.com/jesawyer/702211769362415616/is-oei-tools-publically-available-for-purchase-or

doctorkaboose asked:
Is OEI tools publically available for purchase or is it purely an Obsidian thing? If not, are there any free resources you could point people towards in terms of branching dialogue tools?

OEI Tools is not available for purchase/public use (it is used by some other XBox studios and it has been licensed in the past, but it's never been publicly available).
You can get a free version of articy.draft 3 if you'd like to experiment with branching dialogue systems.

Which other Xbox studios other than inXile?

Beth might want to use it. Playground could be using it for Fable; sure in those games you're only able to communicate through expressions, but that would still involve branching on behalf of the NPCs, wouldn't it?

Arkane and Doublefine also seem like possibilities.

 

[Tyranicon]

...

The best method is to go solodev so everybody knows who to blame when your games suck.

 

[Wunderbar]

yikes.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Major_Blackhart]

At this point, all I want is for him to be so distracted from doing other shit he never works on another video game again. This may be the case with him getting shelved, but we'll see.

There are hopes that Microsoft loses its shit and performs mass firings of senior staff over there at Obshitian. At this point, I'm kinda hoping for it.