Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Infinitron]

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

That's a really good and thoughtful answer on Josh's part. Too bad very little of it was reflected in the game.

 

[Drax]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/133867000061/3-disclaimers-i-love-new-vegas-love-the-legion

Compare this to Pete's answer about the inmortal ghoul kid that survives 200 years without water & food...

 

[Immortal]

Compare this to Pete's answer about the inmortal ghoul kid that survives 200 years without water & food...

Yo dude.. it's just a game dude.. don't think too much about it... brooo...



There must be some kind of correlation between Pete Hines racking up multiple 100s of hours on Fallout 4 (his most played Bethesda title)
and the complete lack of depth this game has.

I just can't put my finger on it....

 

[Irenaeus II]

Yeah, don't use your brain. Being a real human is too much work.

 

[Infinitron]

Compare this to Pete's answer about the inmortal ghoul kid that survives 200 years without water & food...

Well, Pete's not a game developer. It'd be more interesting to ask Todd or Emil, but they just don't do interviews about this kind of stuff, ever.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Who is Emil?

 

[Infinitron]

Who is Emil?

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Emil_Pagliarulo

 

[Irenaeus II]

Jesus Cristo.

 

[Drax]

Hue

 

[Duraframe300]

Jesus Cristo.

From Master Thief to Vault Molester: A Emil Pagliaruo Story

 

[Mozg]

I really liked the thing with the Yes Man ending in New Vegas where he sounds a little menacing saying he's gonna be modify himself to be more independent. You realize the PC has basically just walked into the same trap Benny did, and you're in over your head depending on things you don't really understand.

Except then Sawyer posts shit on Something Awful saying that's not how they meant for you to interpret what Yes Man said. Death of the author mufuh

 

[Infinitron]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/

counterfeit-toast asked: I know you're the nerdy gun nut responsible for 10mm being the big pistol round in FNV; was the "small amount of weapon tuning" you did in OWB adding .45? Or was that just everybody else wanting wanting 1911s and Tommyguns and you just adjusted it to be in line with IRL 10mm vs. .45 performance?

I tuned the antenna, some of the other OWB weapons, and a few perks, IIRC.

.45 Auto, with the pistols and SMGs, were added in Honest Hearts. In reality, .45 ACP is often a less powerful round than 10mm Auto in typical loadings. Let’s just say this point is “arguable” since not everyone agrees, but anyway, in F:NV, it didn’t make sense to add a round with similar game properties to 10mm. That’s why .45 Auto is tuned to Legends of the M1911-levels in F:NV and is considered a higher “tier” than 10mm. The general progression is 9mm, 10mm, .45 Auto, then 12.7mm.

counterfeit-toast asked: Were you involved in Old World Blues? If so, [insert insult of your choice]; if not, are you as mad at the people that were as I am? It cheaped out on raising the difficulty -- I can one-shot a deathclaw in FNV, but it takes two of the same bullets (if I get a crit) to kill a damned DOG in OWB? That's not more difficult, that's just annoying. Is a common problem with game design, though. You got any thoughts on making enemies bullet-sponges vs. making the game actually harder?

OWB is the DLC I was least involved with. I did a small amount of weapon tuning at the very end of development, but otherwise didn’t work on it.

Behavior is usually the more interesting aspect to change when tuning combat difficulty. You can also change encounter composition, which concerns who/what’s in the fight and where they are positioned. Ideally, you do both, but there are costs to those approaches.

Behaviors can be difficult and time consuming to implement and tune, especially if there’s something subtle about them. If they’re linked to certain creature levels or levels of difficulty, it also means that the behavior is less frequently observed during testing. If a behavior requires new abilities, that may mean new animations, new sound effects, new visual effects, and possibly other new assets.

Encounter composition will often run up against performance and space limitations. You can only fit so many creatures in a space before it may have unwanted effects on how the space is used – or how performance is affected. Even on a platform with a much higher ceiling for RAM (PCs), you can still drag a player’s machine to a crawl if you go buck wild with critters.

The approach I liked for Icewind Dale II and Pillars of Eternity was to upgrade some creatures’ behavior and replace lower-level creatures with higher-level ones. It gives us the ability to keep the size of encounters within sane boundaries while still significantly increasing the difficulty. This is especially effective if the replacement creature has a very different type of behavior than what it replaced. You can replace a Blight with a Greater Blight, but replacing a Blight with a wizard is a much more significant change.

Obviously in games like IWD2, PoE, and F:NV, there are credible limits to what we can swap out in any given environment, but if we’re creative, we can change a lot.

supremeleaderlongknife asked: Looking back on the endings to FO:NV, doesn't it seem sort of implied that the NCR is clearly going to die if they do not win? They mention they've pumped lakes dry and that they'll suffer a food shortage within a decade. Meanwhile, I recall one fan calculating out how much House planned to charge the NCR for electricity should he win the war and it was ridiculous, and Indy lacks a direct option to barter with the NCR, no? Is this intended, or are things like Houses fees an "oversight" of sorts?

Characters like Chief Hanlon certainly spell out some dark times ahead for the NCR, but I don’t think any of the characters makes an airtight case that those problems will definitely lead to the collapse of the republic. It’s worth noting that the biggest doomsayers are people like Hanlon or Followers of the Apocalypse who are inclined to believe that the NCR’s mission in the Mojave Wasteland is inherently flawed, immoral, or plain ol’ bad. Confirmation bias can lead people to view the state of things through a strangely-tinted lens.

House planned to charge NCR astronomical fees because he relied on absolute control of the dam, a true hydraulic empire (tiny as it is) backed up by the force of Securitrons. Independent Vegas, with or without upgraded Securitrons, still doesn’t have the leverage of Mr. House and would not be able to charge the fees that House had in mind. As with any negotiations between parties that lack a higher regulatory body, the ultimate price is what the buyer is willing to pay – in money, material, land, control, lives, etc.

 

[Roguey]

I really liked the thing with the Yes Man ending in New Vegas where he sounds a little menacing saying he's gonna be modify himself to be more independent. You realize the PC has basically just walked into the same trap Benny did, and you're in over your head depending on things you don't really understand.

Except then Sawyer posts shit on Something Awful saying that's not how they meant for you to interpret what Yes Man said. Death of the author mufuh

I didn't interpret it that way, and immediately figured it was what Sawyer intended, that he was going to modify his programming so some other chump couldn't use him to backstab you like you did with Benny/House.

In the ending slides "Yes Man becomes a dictator" wasn't even hinted at.

 

[Immortal]

I really liked the thing with the Yes Man ending in New Vegas where he sounds a little menacing saying he's gonna be modify himself to be more independent. You realize the PC has basically just walked into the same trap Benny did, and you're in over your head depending on things you don't really understand.

Except then Sawyer posts shit on Something Awful saying that's not how they meant for you to interpret what Yes Man said. Death of the author mufuh

I didn't interpret it that way, and immediately figured it was what Sawyer intended, that he was going to modify his programming so some other chump couldn't use him to backstab you like you did with Benny/House.

In the ending slides "Yes Man becomes a dictator" wasn't even hinted at.

I interpreted the same way as Mozg initially.. as you said though, no mention in the cutscenes about a betrayal or even a hint that betrayal may be in the future.. So I tend to think that it was either cut during development (the cutscene) or it was as Roguey said. Just a ambiguous way of wording "I won't be Yes-To-Everyone Man"

 

[Mozg]

I thought the implication was that Yes Man having agency (and thus being at least a guy you gotta compromise and negotiate with) instead of just being a perfect slave was what explained getting a "realistic" status-quoish ending instead of whatever personal jerkoff fantasy you might have had planned for what your character would do with your huge new political powerbase.

It seems like Obsidian thought of the Wild Card ending as the "anarchist" ending that's about rebuking the other factions, but effectively it was more the "like Benny except successful" ending.

 

[Neanderthal]

You know looking back at New Vegas, the three dlc that Avellone wrote, there seems to be a theme running through them of things ending and letting go. Wonder if the dude was already thinking about rambling on from Obsidian even then.

 

[Infinitron]

Yes Man's dialogue throughout the game was peppered with hints of unsettling weirdness. It's possible that particular line was intended to sound ominous, but no more than that. It sounded ominous, but that didn't mean anything "real" for the plot, same as all of his other unsettling lines. It was just Yes Man being weird.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Sordid MCA/Prosper Hybryd]

Another positive (at least, definitely non-negative) mention of MCA. Looks like Sawyer has moved on.

 

[Starwars]

I'm sure something more will turn up for the Codex Gossip Rag.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Why, was Sawyer being a negative Nancy for a bit?

 

[Endemic]

"We joked about doing a Mojave Outpost false ending where you could ask Major Knight if you could head back into NCR. He would warn you that the way back likely wouldn’t open up for a while and you could confirm that yeah, you didn’t have any interest in sticking around. Roll credits."

Seems like some people on Shamus Young's site would have appreciated that

 

[Infinitron]

I don't think that's newsworthy.

"We joked about doing a Mojave Outpost false ending where you could ask Major Knight if you could head back into NCR. He would warn you that the way back likely wouldn’t open up for a while and you could confirm that yeah, you didn’t have any interest in sticking around. Roll credits."

Seems like some people on Shamus Young's site would have appreciated that

src mofo:

 

[Infinitron]

We also know Armored Warfare is Ohio: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...anks-from-obsidian.90539/page-22#post-4074247