Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Infinitron]

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

People actually play Honest Hearts?

 

[Roguey]

Everyone loves the survivalist's logs.

 

[Sizzle]

mistajeff-blog asked: Thanks for the response, Josh. To clarify, my question about the Legion being "meant" to fail was specifically in regards to the state of Caesar and the Legion that we see at the time of the game. Was Sallow still shooting from the hip or had he developed a grand, long-term vision of synthesis with NCR that extended beyond the demise of the Legion? He didn't seem to take his own rules very seriously-- he keeps an Auto-Doc in his tent despite his own ban on advanced medicine and technology.

Josh Sawyer: What he tells the Courier in F:NV suggests that he did have a long-term vision that involved the Legion acting as the military arm of the NCR, without the R, i.e. as an empire. He sees Tandi as the most effective NCR leader in large part because she was so powerful and stayed in power for so long.

Caesar absolutely has different standards for himself than for the Legion. This is pretty common for strict and powerful leaders. Even when he was young, Edward Sallow considered himself above/apart from the other Followers of the Apocalypse. The rules apply to everyone else, only to him when it’s suitable.

aeternitimperi asked: Why did Joshua Graham stick around for as long as he did? Were he and Caesar friends or was it just a power trip kind of thing?

Josh Sawyer: He covers this in Honest Hearts, but the short version is that he started out trying to help the tribes. In trying to help, he became involved in morally difficult situations where there was no good solution. Over time, he became progressively more brutal and monstrous. By the time he realized how terrible he had become, he didn’t see a way out.

One of the inspirations for Joshua Graham was T.E. Lawrence and the film Lawrence of Arabia. Of note, the LoA scene where Lawrence has to act as an executioner to satisfy the demands of two tribes.

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi966984473

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Drax]

How is that an answer to the question?

 

[Sensuki]

It's not. He often answers questions about computer games with an answer about tabletop, and he tries to fix tabletop problems that don't really exist in PC games or uses a tabletop solution to solve a PC game problem.

 

[Infinitron]

Uh, I think it's pretty clear that his answer is "No and yes". He uses TTRPGs as an example because that's the most straightforward way to describe RPG gameplay where save scumming doesn't exist (although he could have used roguelikes instead, I guess).

 

[Doktor Best]

Well Josh has a point. Savescumming is definitely killing tension, and this is a problem. The workaround in Dark Souls is maybe the biggest reason it was so successfull.

I have been constantly thinking about how a storybased RPG with emphasis on dialogue and C&C could look like with a restricted form of saving. Some sort of ironman-light-mode.

One solution would be to let the game autosave in intervalls of like 5 minutes, but only lets you reload an autosave that is older than lets say 20 minutes. So you always lose a substancial amount of playtime whenever you reload, but youre not totally fucked.
Then you could implent an ingame sort of currency, (which is really expensive and rare) that lets you create manual saveslots that you can use up shortly before critical combat situations or critical points in the narrative in which you know you may not fuck up by saying the wrong things.
So saving your game would become one form of ressource management and the game would punish savescummers by taking away either their money or their time.

Ofcourse you'd have to design encounters accordingly. You cannot implement dozens of cheapshotting traps to lure the player into without giving any warning signs in this case. Combat situations will have to play out tactically in a way that you can "turn the tide" if you do it right. Also what would be interesting is to implement failstates that are not absolutely deadly to the player, for example you get overwhelmed and put in a cell and you can somehow sneak out of it. Or your enemy simply robs you of your money and leaves you behind unconsciously, like in Gothic games.

It would be a big step forward for interesting forms of interactivity if encounters wouldnt play out as binary as in todays games and offer more shades of grey between party wipe and death, and supreme victory.

 

[Sensuki]

I save-scummed my way through a fight in KotC Orc Fortress because I didn't rest before the draw bridge went up and I was stuck with very damaged chars and a long way until the next rest point, so I had two choices: A) save scum my way through fights B) load an earlier save

It was actually a lot of fun doing it the hard way. The fight against the mages I had to reload so many times to get the exact turn order I needed, and favorable rolls on my attacks and lucky dodges/responses from the enemy AI so that they didn't completely kill my three 1HP chars. Due to that and other experiences, I don't necessarily agree that save-scumming kills tension. I think opting out of the resource management system is worse.

That said I don't disagree with decisions like moving things to deterministic values and stuff like that. I'd also like to see more deterministic combat mechanics in RPGs after playing The Banner Saga.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://twitter.com/lidselarv

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[Roguey]

at a certain point scope starts to negatively impact the quality of what you’re making.

Hello most RPGs.

 

[LESS T_T]

omg Josh's pnp system design from 20 years ago:



They're all ancient DOC files.

A little bit of help for enduring the insanity:
COMBAT~1.pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLfSK8rQaPGRjNrNlEyQXd2Y1k/view?usp=sharing
WEAPONS.pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLfSK8rQaPGUEJIa18zWjZQOTA/view?usp=sharing
ARMOR.pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLfSK8rQaPGYldQM2s1NnRCbms/view?usp=sharing
ATTACK~1.pdf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLfSK8rQaPGSXJjT19NZzMzUDQ/view?usp=sharing

 

[LESS T_T]

Even more Frog Helm Fan Club bulletins:

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[DosBuster]

Spoiler

I'm probably looking way too into this but I'd think Josh of all people would be the one to put down a solid no.

 

[Infinitron]

Knock it off, DosBuster.

 

[Volrath]

Does anyone even care about Obsidian anymore?

 

[Roguey]

Does anyone even care about Obsidian anymore?

Wait until Pillars of Eternity 2 is formally announced.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Does anyone even care about Obsidian anymore?

I think the haters are vocal minority. I still enjoy pillars and while flawed, it is better than 98% of games out there

 

[vortex]

http://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/147619007301/hello-i-have-been-a-huge-fan-of-your-games-since

Is it possible to rewrite NWN2 renderer to next-gen one? Does Obs have licence for this engine?

 

[Fry]

Is it possible to rewrite NWN2 renderer to next-gen one? Does Obs have licence for this engine?

IIRC, no. The NWN2 engine was an upgrade of the NWN1 engine, so presumably used quite a bit of the original code. Bioware probably retained the rights and licensed it to Obsidian/Atari. The only engine Obs has written completely in-house is Onyx (used for Dungeon Siege 3 and South Park).

Not that this really matters since just having the rights to the engine doesn't mean they have rights to work on NWN2... except maybe as a free mod.

 

[Roguey]

The NWN2 engine was an upgrade of the NWN1 engine, so presumably used quite a bit of the original code.

The engine is the same, but the renderer is entirely different (NWN uses OpenGL, NWN2 uses DirectX), much like how The Witcher's renderer is entirely different.

 

[tuluse]

The engine is the same, but the renderer is entirely different (NWN uses OpenGL, NWN2 uses DirectX), much like how The Witcher's renderer is entirely different.

Not exactly the same, I recall Anthony Davis talking about major changes they had to make to support full parties.