Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Israfael]

The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders

Yeah, that's how I remembered games when I was a kid: a game with red-assed spiders (Nox), game with rapetastic metallic spiders (Phase/Blade spiders in NWN), game with funny leaky spiders (araches in diablo 2)

 

[Desiderius]

The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders

Yeah, that's how I remembered games when I was a kid: a game with red-assed spiders (Nox), game with rapetastic metallic spiders (Phase/Blade spiders in NWN), game with funny leaky spiders (araches in diablo 2)

Giant Spider = last card to appear in all MtG core sets.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

My favorites are Dark Messiah spiders.

 

[Viata]

Think of any great high fantasy game, think of it now without any giant spiders. Pretty SHIT, right? Feels like it's MISSING something, huh?

Baldur's Gate 1 for example, Cloakwood, where are the eight leggers? Where the webspinners at? It's a desolate zone. What will you replace me with? BANDITS? Hahaha, yeah, you haven't killed THAT two hundred times before. Hobgoblins? Oh please. I'm a monster manual staple.

Have you ever SEEN game design meetings? The checklist is always: Mechanics/Systems, Classes, Side Content, Giant Spiders. In that order. Face it, punk, I'm here to stay. Come into my lair, or my forest, or my swamp, collect your BEEFY 300 xp, and shaddup. I've met elven women with bigger BALLS than you arachnophobes.

Trying to run me out of a job, nigga fuk u. Been doing this since Tolkien days.

What we need is less generic spiders. There are a fuckton of amazing spiders out there:

 

[hexer]

 

[HoboForEternity]

ffs you dont need a fucking pipe bomb to fucking reveal baby's genitalia.

 

[Glaucon]

Looks like Josh is scouting out some promising writing talent.

 

[Lichtbringer]

"If you reveal your baby's sex 'gender' at a reveal party then you are literally a Nazi that kills people with pipe bombs and here is why."

 

[fantadomat]

"If you reveal your baby's sex 'gender' at a reveal party then you are literally a Nazi that kills people with pipe bombs and here is why."

My baby doesn't have gender,it have only scalps of liberals!

 

[hexer]

Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence

 

[Nano]

"If you reveal your baby's sex 'gender' at a reveal party then you are literally a Nazi that kills people with pipe bombs and here is why."

Spoiler

Is this not enough evidence for you that gender reveal parties are pissing off God?

 

[fantadomat]

Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence

Well if even the government talks about this as a conspiracy theory....then must be 99% legit thing.

 

[Butter]

Is someone putting something in the water?
There has to be a rational explanation for the madness of modern society.
When I was a kid I didn't imagine growing up in a world where gender reveals, pipe bombs and genderlessness are mentioned in the same sentence

They don't need to put it in the water. They put it on the television.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

So now to choose traditional binar gender identity is literally = to kiĺl forests with fire. Well done, FAKE NEWS.

 

[Prime Junta]

New rule: explosions allowed at gender reveals only if the gender revealed is attack helicopter.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

New rule: explosions allowed at gender reveals only if the gender revealed is attack helicopter.

Spoiler

He, she, zombie, plant, raptor, helicoper? Choose your degradation evolution fighter!

 

[Daedalos]

This is called self-destructing.

Or just plain destructing. Sometimes life fucks you over and you do what you can to get through the night. It's not always pretty.

Amen, Bröther.

 

[Quillon]

Yep, even such a minor feature like follow-cam can have great influence on gameplay for many people.

Spoiler

Before anything else PoE is fundamentally unintuitive on the most basic of levels compared to DOS: marquee selecting characters; you'll have to do it and manage your party all the time, its no concern for a usual crpg player but its a hassle for a normie. Its easier to control just one character and others to follow you. Same thing with RTwP, you'll have to "manage" it instead of waiting a turn and taking action.

Bioware managed to make the IE style appeal to mainstream with DAO by removing these basic obstacles for starters.

 

[Atchodas]

I think it’s one of the best innovations in Deadfire.

I feel sorry for him

how bad your sequel has to be that you praise some camera shit and call it one of the best innovations

 

[Desiderius]

I think it’s one of the best innovations in Deadfire.

I feel sorry for him

how bad your sequel has to be that you praise some camera shit and call it one of the best innovations

That’s your brain on the Atlantic.

Reader’s Digest for the Progcurious.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think it’s one of the best innovations in Deadfire.

I feel sorry for him

how bad your sequel has to be that you praise some camera shit and call it one of the best innovations

Well, it is from the same company that made a game that had multiple camera modes to pick from that were all equally shitty.

 

[jac8awol]

Ok I've seen a few vids of Josh in the past, and can you seriously imagine this guy sitting down with anyone in the team and being like 'your idea sucks, get your shit together!' No way, and this is a problem that I guess is endemic to US game development, the idea that people deserve some kind of participation trophy, that no one is ever wrong, that we need to respect everyone's opinion.

Bullshit! There's a serious lack of testosterone in Obsidian's games, and it's been sucking the coherence out of their world-building for years.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Ok I've seen a few vids of Josh in the past, and can you seriously imagine this guy sitting down with anyone in the team and being like 'your idea sucks, get your shit together!' No way, and this is a problem that I guess is endemic to US game development, the idea that people deserve some kind of participation trophy, that no one is ever wrong, that we need to respect everyone's opinion.

Are you kidding me? You can't imagine Josh Sawyer telling his subordinates that their ideas suck? You might want to lurk more. Sawyer's the kind of guy who'll tell you your ideas are bad then give you thirty PowerPoint slides explaining why he's right and you're wrong. I don't remember if it was Sawyer himself or Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky who joked that Josh is Obsidian's in-house autist, but that's not the kind of nickname you get for being respectful of everyone else's opinions. He strikes me as someone who can't resist correcting other people's mistakes, even when it's inappropriate or he's actually in the wrong, although he's probably polite about it. Roguey?

If anything, POE 1 & 2 had the opposite problem. Josh has extremely strong preferences about game design and narrative. That's why he was so dismissive of player feedback that clashed with his worldview while he was making Pillars. It's why Pillars has a more subdued setting and story than the epic Infinity Engine games it was supposed to be mimicking (POE only gets truly epic in the third act and even then it undercuts itself), not to mention more grounded (read less memorable) characters. Sawyer was pretty effective at enforcing these mandates, except where senior management overruled him.

Even if he'd had a better vision, he was in no position to give his team effective criticism. Sawyer's not a big fan of Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 and he doesn't particularly like epic fantasy. He's come pretty close to admitting that he never really understood what people loved about these games, so how the hell was he supposed to know what sucks and what doesn't? He kept flailing around during Deadfire's development, trying to discover what people really want based on POE's reviews, player criticism, and the telemetry data from both the first game and the beta.

Last but not least, he admits he neglected the story stuff in Deadfire. Negligence =/= participation trophies. Sawyer had too many responsibilities and he dropped the ball. Plus, maybe he learned the wrong lesson from POE. The story in Pillars was lackluster, yet the game sold ridiculously well. I can see why he might've concluded that players have low standards so it's not worth stressing about the narrative.

 

[Atchodas]

he might've concluded that players have low standards

not low enough for Deadfire tho

 

[Desiderius]

Are you kidding me?

Nope.

T-level loss is real and it's spectacular(ly devastating).

Josh went from this:

"I was someone who, I grew up playing D&D, I played a tonne of it at university, too much at university, and I kind of just assumed that everyone understood how to play D&D, and so I designed combat and counters that were just ruthless, and brutal, and psychotic."

To a dude afraid of his own shadow.

The dumbing down defenses are an ex post facto rationalization of his own fecklessness. If he really hated BG like he pretends to now he'd have never signed on for PoE in the first place.

Exit the warrior, today's Josh Sawyer.