Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Roguey]

He'd also need to rebalance skill point gain for that to be meaningful at all, and avoid level cap raises which I don't think would fly well with Bethesda players.

Josh doesn't care. You're really only supposed to invest in one weapon skill anyway.

 

[Excidium II]

Good thing they got rid of skills then if it's just decoration.

 

[agris]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/144117415296/what-was-the-rational-behind-the-removal-of-the

Why? Why does a skill need to be useful from the early game to the end?

I've seen Josh use these kind of statements in regards to mechanics in the past. Usually it's about observing players having difficulty regarding some mechanism or contrivance and using said observed player-struggle to make broadly simplifying changes to mechanics. I don't get it. Why does a skill need to be equally useful from the beginning of a game to the end? Is there no room for nuance? Can the world not telegraph that a skill is highly specialized and will not be commonly used?

I bet he has more developed thoughts regarding it and this is just his lazy shorthand for his thought process but it's damn annoying to read about when it's never challenged or discussed in more detail.

 

[Infinitron]

Didn't you just highlight the answer to your question? It's not a "worthwhile investment" due to that. Meaning, other weapon skills are definitely superior choices regardless of how badass Big Guns might be in the late game (and let's face it, in an AAA game, there will never be anything difficult enough to justify that level of badassery - you don't NEED that late game "I win" skill).

 

[agris]

Didn't you just highlight the answer to your question? It's not a "worthwhile investment" due to that. Meaning, other weapon skills are definitely superior choices regardless of how badass Big Guns might be in the late game (and let's face it, in an AAA game, there will never be anything difficult enough to justify that level of badassery - you don't NEED that late game "I win" skill).

That's such circular logic. Other weapon skills are superior choices because they are guaranteed to be viable at the end game, and thus a skill guaranteed to be viable at the endgame must be viable at the start of the game to be competitive, because the others are so? There's nothing in that to even debate, it's just a series of "Make it So" statements that aren't challenged or discussed in a meaningful way, and result in a degenerative set of skills.

Do I want less degenerative skills? Yes. WL2 is the worst offender in this case, kiss my X-ass. Do I want a set of skills in a classless game that yield a unique player power progression curve concomitant with a unique gameplay experience and narrative influenced by the choices I made regarding the building of my character? Yes please.

Do I want all weapon combat skills to be made equal because prior to that, all but one of the weapon combat skills were equally viable from early game to end game? No, that's not design, that's making everything equal because you can't figure out how to make unique skills interesting and compelling. That's also known as phoning it in. The easiest way to balance a series of things is to make them all the same, and that sucks. It's boring. It's an illusion of choice. You might as well create a skill called "attack" and then a skill called "defense" and then....

Oh shit, I've derived PoE's combat skill system.

 

[Infinitron]

Quit using the word "equal", it's a strawman. Skills should be useful and worthwhile.

That's such circular logic. Other weapon skills are superior choices because they are guaranteed to be viable at the end game, and thus a skill guaranteed to be viable at the endgame must be viable at the start of the game to be competitive, because the others are so? There's nothing in that to even debate

I guess!

Maybe you could design an entire game based on a concept of "temporal character speccing" where you're supposed to have different skills during different stages in your character's life cycle, but having stuff like that mixed in with more conventional systems doesn't work so well.

 

[Roguey]

Why? Why does a skill need to be useful from the early game to the end?

"Inherently superior" sets a pretty clear standard, so let's rename Guns and Energy Weapons to something else. Let's call them "Bad Guns" and "Good Guns". You find Bad Guns at the beginning of the game and they are bad. You only find Good Guns toward the end of the game and they are better than all of the Bad Guns. Does it make any sense to have these two skills available at the beginning of the game? Would any non-glutton for punishment, knowing the availability of these weapons from the get-go, do anything other than tag Bad Guns right away and then later buy Good Guns?

This was fundamentally the problem with the Small Guns / Energy Weapons division in Fallout 1, except that first-time players typically had no idea (and no indication from the game) that you would find Small Guns early and EWs later -- and that EWs were generally just the better, late-game weapons. If you tagged EWs and walked out of Vault 13, it was going to be a long, long time before you found a weapon you could use. And if you insisted on finishing the game as a combat character with a Sniper Rifle instead of the Turbo Plasma Rifle, you were essentially handicapping yourself immensely.

What about "weighted skills" where you have to spend more points to raise some skill compared to others? It was suggested on NMA, and it's only one of many ways you could differentiate between "core" skills and "late-game/less used" skills.

I'm not sure that really solves the problem of late game skills, but it does address relative skill imbalance. For a late game skill, you could use a skill system that branches at certain points. E.g. you could have Energy Weapons open up only after you are 10th level and have 50 in Guns and Science.

 

[Prime Junta]

There's a gray area between "completely useless in the beginning and godmode at the end" and "sub-optimal in the beginning, best in the end." I like the trade-offs inherent in picking something that's best now, or best later.

In the FO example, you could just give the player a crusty old laser pistol and a trickle of ammunition in the early game. Playing with EW tagged would be viable even early on, even as your crusty laser pistol is out-shone by assault rifles and combat shotguns and you have to baby your ammunition much more. Then you'd get serious payoff when you get a plasma rifle.

 

[Infinitron]

That's not even what we're talking about here, though. The Small Guns/Energy Weapons thing in FO1 is bad, but at least in that game there is a real incentive to spec in Energy Weapons. It's an option that's presented obtusely, in a way that's likely to screw players over, but it is a worthwhile option. Not so for late-game "Big Guns" in say, Fallout 2 - who even needs them?

 

[Prime Junta]

FO1/2 character mechanics aren't exactly a shining beacon of good systems design anyway, it's not like that's the only trap choice there, or even the worst one.

I just thought it was a bit of a poor example of the point Saint Josh was illustrating because it would've been so easy to address through content.

I also dislike Josh's proposed solution as it's very railroady, it's an obviously signposted upgrade path. IMO it's better to make it so that some skills kick ass in the early game but are meh in the late game and vice versa, as long as the early-game-meh skills aren't completely useless. Again: because I like the inherent trade-offs in both directions.

 

[Roguey]

Not so for late-game "Big Guns" in say, Fallout 2 - who even needs them?

The bozar's pretty great and an acceptable replacement for energy weapons ^_^

 

[Spectacle]

A Big Guns/Small Guns division makes more sense than a Guns/Energy weapons division. Both guns and energy weapons work the same way; point at target and press trigger. Why would they require different skills?

 

[Ninjerk]

Recoil?

 

[Roguey]

I also dislike Josh's proposed solution as it's very railroady, it's an obviously signposted upgrade path. IMO it's better to make it so that some skills kick ass in the early game but are meh in the late game and vice versa, as long as the early-game-meh skills aren't completely useless. Again: because I like the inherent trade-offs in both directions.

New Vegas already has something like this with unarmed/melee, which are feast/famine choices.

 

[Prime Junta]

I think NV is about as good as you can make the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system while keeping it recognisable.

 

[Mozg]

I think NV is about as good as you can make the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system while keeping it recognisable.

Uh, you could not have hats that give you +10 lockpicking or whatever that you can hold in your inventory and put on to pick a lock. Boom, I have transcended New Vegas' implementation.

New Vegas is underfunded triage on Fallout 3.

 

[Prime Junta]

I think NV is about as good as you can make the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system while keeping it recognisable.

Uh, you could not have hats that give you +10 lockpicking or whatever that you can hold in your inventory and put on to pick a lock. Boom, I have transcended New Vegas' implementation.

New Vegas is underfunded triage on Fallout 3.

Fuck you Mozg, I pick locks way better when wearing my burglar hat.

 

[Roguey]

Uh, you could not have hats that give you +10 lockpicking or whatever that you can hold in your inventory and put on to pick a lock. Boom, I have transcended New Vegas' implementation.

There's nothing wrong with this.

I know what the issue is; I just don't think that it matters. If the bonuses are typically applied to items that are otherwise worthless, it's not detracting from the higher end items. Given the option to have the outfits or not have the outfits, I think most players would prefer to have the outfits. But if there's really no reason to wear them, the player's practical options get much more limited. I'd rather give the player more options and sacrifice some realism to do so.

 

[Mozg]

I doubt you have the context of that quote correct. The reason that's stupid has nothing to do with "realism" and I don't think Sawyer would try to rationalize the decision that way.

 

[Roguey]

I doubt you have the context of that quote correct. The reason that's stupid has nothing to do with "realism" and I don't think Sawyer would try to rationalize the decision that way.

Well there's also

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/54663-fallout-new-vegas/page-14#entry1029651

It depends on the context, but whether or not we allow you to repeat has less to do with realism/plausibility and more to do with not penalizing the player for encountering a challenge at the "wrong" time in his/her build. If most of the safes you encountered in the wasteland wouldn't allow you to pick them after the first time they were examined, that would be kind of irritating. The "you're going to fail" options aren't present in dialogue so the player can select them and see the wacky response to their incompetence (although that does have some appeal), but to let the player know that there's a challenge there that they can't currently meet. Unless you're being directly confronted (e.g. the ambush scenario you described), allowing the player to return and attempt the challenge with a higher skill is less punitive and does reward players who choose to go and advance their skills -- whether that's through leveling up, using chems, or reading skill magazines. Magazines and chems only provide a small boost though, so if the threshold is 80 and you have 33 in the skill, you're not going to be able to bridge that gap without some serious time and effort (i.e., leveling up).

 

[Infinitron]

This is kind of interesting:

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'd really like to see what Josh considers bad writing but I guess it's an inappropriate question to ask.

When he describes the narrative designer's duties, the picture that came to my mind was an office meeting where an area designer says "I have this cool idea for an area, Josh gave it a go, it's going to look like this and this...". Then the narrative designer has to fill a string of quotas - at least 3 companion barks at various spots, at least 5 spots where the player should be able to click the spying glass icon to get bits of "narrative content", come up with ideas for combat encounters that have a good narrative excuse for being placed in that area, etc. As I've said, the game felt better in the expansions, so I wonder what changed in their process there relative to the base game. In the base game however, things didn't always mesh very well and you could feel how different people did their own passes.

 

[Prime Junta]

I wonder what changed in their process there relative to the base game. In the base game however, things didn't always mesh very well and you could feel how different people did their own passes.

Taking an educated guess... time and pressure. Pillars was a huge scramble to meet all those overambitious stretch goals while trying to make a game at the same time. The expansions are more limited in scope and they had a lot more time to get familiar and flesh out the world and the lore.

 

[Sannom]

Also, the White March had the perfect setting to have lot of stuff referenced in it : lengthy discussions with two gods. Ondra referenced the dress-lady from the sanitarium and Abydon called me out on my bullshit when it comes to animancy and the fusion of metal and flesh.

 

[Sizzle]

mistajeff-blog asked: Considering all of Caesar's talk of hegelian dialectics and the Legion serving as an antithesis to the NCR's thesis, finding the Roman legion to be a societal structure equivalent to the trials of a post-apocalyptic world that isn't ready for (and hasn't earned) a democratic political structure, and Ulysses saying the Bear will collapse as soon as it reaches the sea: was the Legion meant to fail?

Meant by whom? The genesis of Caesar’s Legion was Edward Sallow’s desperation. The idea of transforming the Legion through the conquest of NCR was something that came much later. Most of the Legion’s early development was organic and ad hoc. The structure the Courier sees in F:NV took many years to develop, as did Caesar’s plans. Edward Sallow did not create the Legion as something intended to eventually fail, but as a means of (initially) extracting himself from a difficult situation.