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Interview Josh Sawyer on Pillars of Eternity at PC Gamer

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Tags: J.E. Sawyer; Obsidian Entertainment; Pillars of Eternity

Obsidian's Josh Sawyer recently gave a nice big interview to PC Gamer on the topic of Pillars of Eternity. Besides the usual discussion of game mechanics, this particular interview also has some newish information about the game world itself. Here's an excerpt:

PC Gamer: There are two large cities in the game. What can you tell me about them?

Josh Sawyer: The first big city that we made is called Defiance Bay, and that’s the bigger of the two cities. It could be compared to a city like Baldur’s Gate or Athkatla. It wouldn’t be thought of as modern, but it’s a more contemporary type of city. It has renaissance-style architecture, it’s very cosmopolitan, it has a lot of regular trade and traffic, it’s a port city. It has a number of big districts full of quests and characters you can interact with.

In contrast to that, Twin Elms is the second big city. It’s somewhat smaller, but still pretty big. It has a very different look and feel to it. The people who live there have built on top of ancient ruins, and their architecture looks more Anglo-Saxon, from the 9th or 10th Century, with a lot of wood used. Very different shapes and a different feeling to the environment. The culture is different too. It’s a much more religious community overall. Religion and temples pretty much dominate the lives of the people who live there. The artists and the designers did a really good job of creating two communities that are very big and have a lot of content in them.

PC Gamer: How will players be able to traverse it besides walking?

Josh Sawyer: It’s pretty much just walking, but we do have a world map much like the Infinity Engine games. We wanted to make a world where if you want just explore from the edge of the map to another map, you can do that. There are a lot of opportunities in the wilderness where you can go from map to map by going to the border and seeing what’s in the next zone. But as time goes by and you want to rapidly travel, we do have the classic type of Infinity Engine map where you’ll click on an icon on the map, and it’ll tell you how long it’ll take to get there, and time will elapse. You might get fatigued, or it might be night or morning when you arrive.

PC Gamer: Will you be able to combine spells and abilities in any interesting ways?

Josh Sawyer: Those aren’t explicitly built in like hard combinations. In most cases it’s situational. A big one is that rogues get sneak attacks and backstabs, but they get it from a wide variety of conditions. If the target is blinded, stunned or prone, all those things allow a rogue to immediately sneak attack on them. A lot of different characters can inflict those status effects, including the rogue. Fighters can knock down targets, druids have spells that can paralyse. So instead of being combinations of effects, it’s mostly about looking at how each of the classes can be maximally effective, and then using the general abilities in classes to bring out the best in those characters. A rogue can do a lot on his or her own, but other classes can also coordinate with them to create neat effects.

In other cases, it’s mostly about using the different characters’ abilities to manage battle spaces better. The fighter has an ability called Defender which allows them to kind of act like flypaper. Something that was a big hassle in the Infinity Engine games was that characters couldn’t really be sticky. It was very hard to get an enemy to stop moving. Often that was a big deal, because if a fighter made a beeline for one of your squishier characters, especially casters, you were in trouble. But now you have to think about where to position them, to maximise their benefit for casters, rogues, and other characters that might not be able to take a beating.

PC Gamer: What kind of fantasy RPG standards or cliches are you trying to avoid or subvert?

Josh Sawyer: I just try to avoid doing things that I don’t personally like. For example, the class balance stuff was done because I’ve made a bunch of these games, and I’ve been playing D&D for most of my life, and I keep seeing very strong trends towards behaviour that I don’t think makes players happier. It doesn’t give them as much choice as the systems claim to give them, and I think we can do a better job. If someone wants to make a brilliant, weakling fighter, that is a build that is viable in our game, and it’s rewarded within the conversations and the fiction of the world. That’s not something that’s really true of playing Dungeons & Dragons.

If you want to make a muscle wizard, who is mighty and powerful and a stupid idiot, you can do that. Mechanically what happens is that you’ll do a lot of damage, but their durations and areas of effects will be very small. Then in conversation they’re total idiots. [laughs] You can bully people and you can pick them up off the ground and slap them around. It’s not like I’m setting out to subvert stuff. I play tabletop games with a lot of people who have really great ideas for characters, but mechanically they’re shitty characters. So when I try to fix that stuff, it’s not because I think it’s inherently better, but that it gives more opportunities to players to create more diverse characters, and feel rewarded for doing so.
The full interview has more information on lore, classes, combat, companions, difficulty options, and more. Check it out, it's a pretty good overview of the game in its current state.
 

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"We wanted to make a world where if you want just explore from the edge of the map to another map, you can do that"

That means that the map setup will be the same as Bardur's Gate? Traverse the world map in successive maps?
 

Tytus

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The cities sound really boring. Another western type medieval cities that we saw hundreds of times in the past in other games, kinda meh. I hope the art design will be up to the task and offer me something interesting despite the overplayed setting.

Fighters being sticky also sounds kinda strange. I understand that we need to have some sort of attack of opportunity, like in D&D4 but, I fear it will result in some sort of MMO bullshit, where the fighter uses and ability like a shout, draws aggro and the enemies like idiots all attack him completely ignoring the 4x times more dangerous caster in the back. I hope I'm wrong.
 

tuluse

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All characters are sticky. Fighters just have more things stick to them.

This will stop the silliness from IE where combats could just run past melee dudes and head straight for the wizards and is pure incline.
 

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I fear it will result in some sort of MMO bullshit, where the fighter uses and ability like a shout, draws aggro and the enemies like idiots all attack him completely ignoring the 4x times more dangerous caster in the back. I hope I'm wrong.

PoE doesn't have aggro mechanics AFAIK. The AI does what it wills.
 

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The older games, including the games I worked on, relied heavily on something called pre-buffing. So in a lot of cases you’d have, say, three casters spending four to six rounds before every fight dumping a bunch of spells on your characters to get them into combat shape. Not super interesting. We wanted buffs to stay in the game and still feel powerful, but now there’s an opportunity cost for them, meaning they can only be cast in combat. So you can cast your crazy haste spells or blessings or prayers or whatever, but you have to do it in the context of the combat, because instead of them becoming a sort of no-brainer thing you do just out of habit, it should be something you choose to do in the context of a battle. If you choose to cast that buff spell, you’re choosing to cast it instead of a fireball or a lightning bolt. Ideally we want the choices you make to be tactical decisions made in the moment.

I'm not so sure about this. Pre-buffing was always optional, so players could buff during combat if they felt buffing was cheating, since the AI couldn't do it. However, to bar it altogether seems a tad arbitrary.

Also, there was a cost to pre-buffing in the IE games as well: namely using up the spell slot and having to rest. Going into combat with minimal buffing allowed the player to fight more enemies before resting (which could be interrupted).
 

agris

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It's a dubious statement for sure- the ability to prebuff was heavily modulated by buff duration. A lot buffs had short durations, and you had to think hard about how to layer them. I get where he's coming from, but I'm not sure I like the resulting mechanic.
 

Abelian

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the AI couldn't do it.

Bullshit. I don't care if they call it "tattoo of power" or whatever, it's mechanically the same as pre-buffing.
Forgot about that one; they introduced it in BG2. I remember the spell triggers, sequencers and contingencies from BG2, but those were available to both the player and AI.
 

Hormalakh

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Not only can you not prebuff, you guys know that if u drink potions, only one of the buffs is active right? You can't drink multiple potions, hoping to get buffed like that.
 

Anubioz

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Strange, I remember oil of speed working with potion of invisibility just fine in BG...

Anyway, I'll probably download the recently updated BiG World Mod and look into everything myself. Obviously, those 3D-tank-MMO-developers, who can't even kill a tutorial wolf pack in a 2D game, can't be trusted in knowing anything about balance - I bet even Stick of Truth would be far superior in balancing stuff than PoE, and one should expect an isometric-Alpha-Protocol gameplay.
 
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Can scum around it, therefore interrupted resting is effectively not a thing. :balance:

Or the shit that interrupts is just free xp if you decide to rest at around half-HP/spell slots, rather than only when you have absolutely nothing left.
 

Abelian

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Can scum around it, therefore interrupted resting is effectively not a thing.

Or the shit that interrupts is just free xp if you decide to rest at around half-HP/spell slots, rather than only when you have absolutely nothing left.
Oh, that. I'll admit I used to save scum, but got I guess I grew out of it and chose the free XP instead.
 

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After several days spent with WeiDU, LUA, NearInfinity & Windows Command Prompt, I finally managed to install all of those megamods on top of my BG1&2. In case anyone wants a copy of a working BiG World installation - please feel free to message me for your 18.5 GB of RPG awesomeness.
 

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There was no new information in that interview, but reading it all again condensed like this gave me a hope and hype boost for PoE. In Josh I trust, and I am not even joking. Everything he said in that article was good design. Now they only have to deliver on these promises.

In before Roguey jokes.
 
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It really emphasises just how badly the game industry (and the gaming press) has forgotten that computer games are games when you realise that from the time of Everquest there's been no real innovation in how to implement party formation in a way that lets the melee classes protect the squishies. For well over a decade, we've had a choice between idiotically running past the enemy's front lines, or idiotically ignoring enemies standing right next to each other and in easy attack range because a non-magical fighter casts some sort of insanely powerful 'charm' spell known as aggro (just think for a moment how massively overpowered this 'charm person' ability would need to be for aggro to make any sense in the game's lore - fuck fighting, those fighters should just be mind-controlling everyone to death). It's such an obvious area to improve upon that you'd expect any developer with a smideon of interest in the mechanics of their game to have a crack at improving on it.

And when someone says they are taking a crack at it, it's of so little interest to the industry, press and most players that it isn't even hype-worthy beyond a comment in a community update. Apparently, replacing full dialogue selection with colour-coded key words, and close-ups of a B-list actress's ass computer-modelled into a game are 'hold the press' revolutionary breakthroughs in gaming, but innovating actual game mechanics is banal shit boring.

It's idiocy like this that leads to the Heavy Rain / Farenheit developer complaining that their games were just too innovative for the market to appreciate, without realising that the 'game' component of these amazingly innovative games was just a Guitar Hero rythym game clone that had been done to death years before those games came out.
 

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Azrael the cat To be fair, RPGs did try to do this with attacks of opportunity, but they tended to be poorly implemented. The key is the "sticky" aspect. First you get stuck, then only if you move after that, you get hit. That makes things a lot more predictable in a real-time battle - and easier to program the enemy AI around, too.
 

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Azrael the cat To be fair, RPGs did try to do this with attacks of opportunity, but they tended to be poorly implemented. The key is the "sticky" aspect. First you get stuck, then only if you move after that, you get hit. That makes things a lot more predictable in a real-time battle - and easier to program the enemy AI around, too.
PnP has lots of solutions. CRPGs doing terrible implementations of PnP ideas doesn't really qualify as innovation.
 

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