Eternity Josh Sawyer reflects on his failures with Pillars of Eternity

[Ismaul]

Agree. But i really could live without voice acting of these guys

I disagree. I fucking love those guys and their elephant noises.

 

[Humbaba]

Good voice acting can enhance a character as much as bad voice acting can degrade one imo. Of course it's not necessary but a good performance really adds a lot, especially in cRPGs where you don't actually see anybody speak or emote at all. Voice acting in such a case serves the same purpose as a radio drama, where in the absence of a visual performance all that is left than can convey character and personality is the vocal performance. The IE games understood this, which is why many performances are exaggerated and very theatrical. Modern games like PoE especially do not get that at all and also take themselves way too seriously which results in extremely bland performances. Either it's that direction has gotten a lot worse or the influx of anime voice actors in the business has lowered the level of voice acting in general.

 

[anvi]

This thread made me reflect on the time I slipped on some stairs. Luckily I was unhurt. Good thread.

 

[ferratilis]

Is this his way of finally admitting that he hates RPGs? Or just another phase?

https://www.pcgamer.com/josh-sawyer...i-worked-on-were-pillars-of-eternity-1-and-2/

Josh Sawyer: 'The most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2'​

Though he's still proud of them, Pillars of Eternity's game director would have liked them to be different.

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring's success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian's design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.

"I've been playing D&D since 1985," Sawyer said, "and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, 'Yeah!' I was so stoked." He describes working on Icewind Dale and its sequel, official D&D adaptations made in the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate had been before them, as an opportunity to "dump" into videogames every idea he had about D&D while playing it around a table.

Years later, he returned to that kind of top-down, party-based, real-time-with-pause CRPG with Pillars of Eternity, which raised a record-breaking $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012. But he returned a different man, with different ideas about how to design an RPG.

"Honestly, I have to say it felt like the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2," Sawyer said. "Because when I came back to that format, I was like, 'Oh, I worked on these two [Icewind Dale] games, and then I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own.' But they were crowdfunded games and the audience was like, 'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."

That said, Sawyer doesn't consider the Pillars of Eternity games as they ended up to be failures, even if they are held back by their format rather than being "an evolution" of it. "It was a very weird experience, but I'm still proud of the games," he said.

Our RPG roundtable also included Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more of the things they talked about, as well as listen to the whole 80-minute conversation right here.

 

[vortex]

This means Pillars 3 will be brand new format with new ideas.

 

[Alienman]

Man, he really hated that kickstarter audience. Also:

'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"

He kinda fucked up that too with his stat experimentation. I truly wonder what kind of ideas he had for the game, if this wasn't one of them.

 

[whocares]

I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.

 

[Maxie]

Man, he really hated that kickstarter audience. Also:

'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"

He kinda fucked up that too with his stat experimentation. I truly wonder what kind of ideas I had for the game, if this wasn't one of them.

This one really activates my almonds.

Young and naive, inexperienced in the matters of kickstarter fleecing, I got conned into dishing out some ducats for POE because it was promising to be precisely the game I wanted. And then I went to the Obsidian forums to follow the development. And gradually, one update at a time, it became apparent to me that no, this wasn't the game I wanted, the one they promised, but some other weird beast with no combat XP and muscle wizards and whatnot. And every time a reveal like that dropped, I, a paying customer who made the thing possible, went to complain on the forums and remind them that this wasn't what I was promised, only to be drowned in a sea of sycophants slurping anything that came out of Josh's asshole, asking for more, and telling me and a few other people in a state of discontent that we had no idea what we were talking about. After a while, I just told them all to fuck off and peaced out. Worst thing - couldn't even call anyone a retard in that place.

And then it launched and was so much worse than anyone could've expected. Not only did it have little to do with IE games (Baldur's Gate with PST writing my ass), it was just plain bad, boring, bloated, and buggy. But everyone on the internet was praising this mother of all ripoffs and I felt like I was losing my mind. Thankfully, I then stumbled onto Roxor's revio and discovered Codex, of which I only heard in passing before, and everything was right in the world again.

But now balance man crying that he didn't get to make the game he wanted, when he already didn't give us the game we wanted, can fuck right off again.

Heh at least you got the product in the end. The Kickstarter grift is ridiculous, I paid for a game which is still in development after like four years, and for another that happens to be Black Geyser

 

[ferratilis]

I'm more annoyed by his patronizing attitude than anything else. "I could've given the unwashed masses the RPG of their dreams, but they would not have it." We're not talking about some game design genius here, he's the kind of guy who makes priests essential in one game, only to make them redundant in the next one. Constantly flip-flopping between design decisions and blaming the players when those decision backfire. That's what makes it annoying. Fuck you, if you wanted to make point and click adventure games instead of RPGs, you should've said so from the start.

 

[Alienman]

I'm more annoyed by his patronizing attitude than anything else. "I could've given the unwashed masses the RPG of their dreams, but they would not have it." We're not talking about some game design genius here, he's the kind of guy who makes priests essential in one game, only to make them redundant in the next one. Constantly flip-flopping between design decisions and blaming the players when those decision backfire. That's what makes it annoying. Fuck you, if you wanted to make point and click adventure games instead of RPGs, you should've said so from the start.

I think that attitude comes through now since he has been propped up by game journos and non-gamers. He doesn't have to care about unwashed plebs anymore, he is a certified artist now with Pentiment - the so-called Oscar bait game.

 

[Maxie]

I'm more annoyed by his patronizing attitude than anything else. "I could've given the unwashed masses the RPG of their dreams, but they would not have it." We're not talking about some game design genius here, he's the kind of guy who makes priests essential in one game, only to make them redundant in the next one. Constantly flip-flopping between design decisions and blaming the players when those decision backfire. That's what makes it annoying. Fuck you, if you wanted to make point and click adventure games instead of RPGs, you should've said so from the start.

I think that attitude comes through now since he has been propped up by game journos and non-gamers. He doesn't have to care about unwashed plebs anymore, he is a certified artist now with Pentiment - the so-called Oscar bait game.

I think he's easily impressionable and wants to enjoy the same attention Disco Whatever people did back in the day

 

[Sizzle]

Is this his way of finally admitting that he hates RPGs? Or just another phase?

https://www.pcgamer.com/josh-sawyer...i-worked-on-were-pillars-of-eternity-1-and-2/

Josh Sawyer: 'The most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2'​

By Jody Macgregor
published about 3 hours ago
Though he's still proud of them, Pillars of Eternity's game director would have liked them to be different.

(Image credit: Josh Sawyer, Obsidian Entertainment)

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring's success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian's design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.
"I've been playing D&D since 1985," Sawyer said, "and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, 'Yeah!' I was so stoked." He describes working on Icewind Dale and its sequel, official D&D adaptations made in the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate had been before them, as an opportunity to "dump" into videogames every idea he had about D&D while playing it around a table.
Years later, he returned to that kind of top-down, party-based, real-time-with-pause CRPG with Pillars of Eternity, which raised a record-breaking $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012. But he returned a different man, with different ideas about how to design an RPG.
"Honestly, I have to say it felt like the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2," Sawyer said. "Because when I came back to that format, I was like, 'Oh, I worked on these two [Icewind Dale] games, and then I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own.' But they were crowdfunded games and the audience was like, 'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"
The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."
That said, Sawyer doesn't consider the Pillars of Eternity games as they ended up to be failures, even if they are held back by their format rather than being "an evolution" of it. "It was a very weird experience, but I'm still proud of the games," he said.

(Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment)
Our RPG roundtable also included Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more of the things they talked about, as well as listen to the whole 80-minute conversation right here.

While I generally appreciate JS, it's always fascinating to see how his autism prevents him from missing the obvious reasons elements of his games don't really work.

The main reason why PoE 1 and 2 weren't as popular with the nostalgia crowd is not down to the retro design choices themselves, but primarily due to his inability to identify why the Infinity Engine games worked and what was fun about them in the first place.

Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 had an almost perfect blend of lightheartedness and epicness to them. Their stories and characters were memorable precisely because they didn't spend too much time in pointless philosophy and trying to reinvent the wheel, but they were instead simple, classic concepts designed for maximum fun and (heh) engagement.

And though I love a lot of things about PoE (mainly the differences between classes, and the way that each attribute has an impact) and consider many things about them superior to the IE games, the way that the gameplay system is so needlessly obtuse and complicated, the way that the story takes its pretty silly core concept (THE GODS AREN'T REAL, OH NOES) so seriously, and the bloated, exposition-and-lore-dump-heavy writing leaves a lot to be desired.

But the worst thing is that he simply can't wrap his head around any of this, even though it's really not that difficult to figure out.

 

[vortex]

Pillars 3 will be uncompromised by loud nostalgia crowd. It will be pure Sawyer.

 

[vortex]

Looks like JS really thinks that Pentiment is a better game than both Pillars ones combined?

From design perspective it is. It keeps player engaged. First 2 hours of Deadfire is a slog with a mixture of things and you don't know what is trying to become.

 

[Maxie]

Pillars 3 will be uncompromised by loud nostalgia crowd. It will be pure Sawyer.

Sawyer is a major contributor to the nostalgia by having worked on Icewind Dale. While I can applaud him for not wanting to be a fat has-been making rehashes of the game he's done twenty years ago, it's insufferable how dismissive he is about it, as if it were some youthful indiscretion type thing. He's notoriously ungrateful, and kind of a fucking dick.

 

[Egosphere]

Looks like JS really thinks that Pentiment is a better game than both Pillars ones combined?

They're so different that it's impossible to compare, unless you simply assert that side-scrolling adventure-ish walkie talkie is the superior genre to isometric RPGs.
Pentiment may be more engaging to some, to call it in any way better is a stretch to put it mildly. Like proclaiming a bicycle to be better than a car.

 

[Slaver1]

Is this his way of finally admitting that he hates RPGs? Or just another phase?

https://www.pcgamer.com/josh-sawyer...i-worked-on-were-pillars-of-eternity-1-and-2/

Josh Sawyer: 'The most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2'​

Though he's still proud of them, Pillars of Eternity's game director would have liked them to be different.

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring's success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian's design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.

"I've been playing D&D since 1985," Sawyer said, "and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, 'Yeah!' I was so stoked." He describes working on Icewind Dale and its sequel, official D&D adaptations made in the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate had been before them, as an opportunity to "dump" into videogames every idea he had about D&D while playing it around a table.

Years later, he returned to that kind of top-down, party-based, real-time-with-pause CRPG with Pillars of Eternity, which raised a record-breaking $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012. But he returned a different man, with different ideas about how to design an RPG.

"Honestly, I have to say it felt like the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2," Sawyer said. "Because when I came back to that format, I was like, 'Oh, I worked on these two [Icewind Dale] games, and then I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own.' But they were crowdfunded games and the audience was like, 'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."

That said, Sawyer doesn't consider the Pillars of Eternity games as they ended up to be failures, even if they are held back by their format rather than being "an evolution" of it. "It was a very weird experience, but I'm still proud of the games," he said.

Our RPG roundtable also included Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more of the things they talked about, as well as listen to the whole 80-minute conversation right here.

What a ludicrous bullshitter. He's pretending POE hewed close to the original IE games when the latter beat the pants off his shitty games. Maybe he should admit he couldn't match the original games instead of basically saying they sucked for a modern audience so "faithfully" aping them was a bad idea.

He probably got the wrong idea about how faithful a homage the POE series was by hanging around in sterilized online spaces too much; much the same way he's turned into such a wet blanket frequenting the same kind of places IRL.

 

[Alienman]

I think he's easily impressionable and wants to enjoy the same attention Disco Whatever people did back in the day

First it was the Battle Brother devs

 

[whydoibother]

For those that missed it: It Takes an Abbey: Developing Pentiment with a (Small) Remote Team

 

[Harthwain]

They're so different that it's impossible to compare, unless you simply assert that side-scrolling adventure-ish walkie talkie is the superior genre to isometric RPGs.

The problem lies even deeper - PoE isn't just "an isometric RPG". It's rooted in a combat-heavy part of isometric RPGs. The whole system is geared towards that. Which naturally lends itself more towards conflicts (combat), instead of problem-solving (by means other than combat). And I would argue that problem-solving is much more interesting, and much more RPG-oriented, than combat as such.

 

[Roguey]

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."

What were these so-called bad design decisions? Because all the things people hate were his new ideas.

 

[Infinitron]

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."

What were these so-called bad design decisions? Because all the things people hate were his new ideas.

I think Josh Sawyer (for lack of a better word) overestimated his audience. He believed that people who'd played Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale (and were willing to crowdfund a spiritual successor to those games) had grown up to become somewhat jaded contrarian gaming intellectuals like him. People who'd appreciate difference for its own sake, especially if it was pushing towards a more "mature" direction.

For example, you might ask "Why muscle wizards?". I think Josh Sawyer would answer to that: "Why not? It's a new mechanic that fits with my design goals, which I've described to you in exhaustive detail. Don't you find that interesting for its own sake? Aren't you people, who were willing to pay for an isometric RPG three years before its release, supposed to be genre connoisseurs would be interested in experimenting with new mechanics? Why aren't you willing to give this a shot?" And the same for numerous other changes and aspects of the game.

 

[roshan]

Is this his way of finally admitting that he hates RPGs? Or just another phase?

https://www.pcgamer.com/josh-sawyer...i-worked-on-were-pillars-of-eternity-1-and-2/

Josh Sawyer: 'The most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2'​

Though he's still proud of them, Pillars of Eternity's game director would have liked them to be different.

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring's success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian's design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.

"I've been playing D&D since 1985," Sawyer said, "and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, 'Yeah!' I was so stoked." He describes working on Icewind Dale and its sequel, official D&D adaptations made in the Infinity Engine just like Baldur's Gate had been before them, as an opportunity to "dump" into videogames every idea he had about D&D while playing it around a table.

Years later, he returned to that kind of top-down, party-based, real-time-with-pause CRPG with Pillars of Eternity, which raised a record-breaking $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012. But he returned a different man, with different ideas about how to design an RPG.

"Honestly, I have to say it felt like the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2," Sawyer said. "Because when I came back to that format, I was like, 'Oh, I worked on these two [Icewind Dale] games, and then I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own.' But they were crowdfunded games and the audience was like, 'No, we want D&D, we want exactly the same experience as the Infinity Engine games.'"

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that, in the words of that first Kickstarter(opens in new tab), "pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past", meant Sawyer felt he had to keep Pillars of Eternity retro even in places where he had better ideas. "I did feel a sense of obligation," he said, "but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic."

That said, Sawyer doesn't consider the Pillars of Eternity games as they ended up to be failures, even if they are held back by their format rather than being "an evolution" of it. "It was a very weird experience, but I'm still proud of the games," he said.

Our RPG roundtable also included Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more of the things they talked about, as well as listen to the whole 80-minute conversation right here.

What an idiot. This stupid pussy can't accept that a decade from now people will still be playing Icewind Dale but Pillars of Shitternity will be a long forgotten irrelevance. The truth is he has no clue what makes games and combat fun, he thought he was such a genius and would bring his enlightened ideas to an IE style game, but all his ideas simply sucked.

 

[Butter]

Deadfire moved even further away from IE design with its per-encounter bullshit, and surprise surprise it made the game worse. Maybe the players know better than you, Josh.

 

[Krivol]

Like proclaiming a bicycle to be better than a car.

Fucking cyclist! A car is better than bicycle! Comparing Pentiment to Deadfire is somewhat like comparing Paki co-workers and English cuisine - both are shit.