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Interview Josh Sawyer talks Pillars of Eternity at Eurogamer, confirms no romances

Infinitron

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

Josh Sawyer has been a busy man lately. In his latest interview, over at Eurogamer, he discusses various aspects of Pillars of Eternity, such as its artistic style, its themes, the stronghold and modding. But the best part is the confirmation that the game will have no romances. I quote:

Pillars' characters are not flamboyant fantasy heroes, not wizards with pointy hats, not knights with elaborate armour. 'Why?' people asked after watching the recent trailer (embedded above). 'Why are the characters so... normal?'

"Some people might not like that our characters' proportions and outfits look comparatively drab and dressed down and not exaggerated," answered Sawyer, "but that's also kind of what the original [Infinity Engine] games were like. They don't look like [World of Warcraft] characters, they don't look like Diablo characters. They're not super-exaggerated.

"It was fantasy," he added, "but it was mundane fantasy."

It stems from the work of a man called Keith Parkinson, who did artwork for Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR back in the day.

"He had a philosophy to make the fantastical mundane," Sawyer recalled, "and to make the mundane fantastical, and so he achieved a really neat look in his D&D art, and so we've referred to that in a lot of cases, where you take something that's very fantastic and you make it a little more believable, and you take something that's very mundane and you dress it up so it's a little more fantastical."

Romances between you and fellow adventurers seem to be a de facto feature of role-playing games today. But Obsidian isn't doing them in Pillars of Eternity.

"We're not doing romances," said Sawyer, "but [the other characters] do have pretty detailed stories, they do have their own personal motivations and goals that sometimes align with yours and sometimes they don't. They interject into your conversations, they argue with you, they argue with each other."

And if you play on Expert mode, or if you enable character death, then followers can die. But Obsidian's "not real big on having characters die in scripted sequences". (Incidentally, if you don't like the given, storied crop of party members, you can make your own, using the Adventurer's Hall.)

[...] Pillars of Eternity gives you, the player, a base - a base that can be upgraded over time and where events will happen. It can even be attacked. And it's called a Stronghold.

"Those events range from visitors coming to people mounting an attack against you to a travelling merchant or someone needs help," explained Sawyer. "And these little events are things you can send your adventurers [to do], or your companions that are not in the party - you can send them to go do them and get little rewards for them. It is a sort of game within a game, but you can manage it from anywhere in the world - there's actually a dedicated part of the UI for managing your Stronghold while you're out and about.

"When Tim Cain [key person from the original Fallout games] was implementing it, he had only implemented it essentially through text - there wasn't even the area, and he was still having fun with it."

You'll come across your Stronghold early on. But, said Sawyer, "When you find it, it's unsurprisingly not in great shape, and you have the ability to restore sections of it and change your roster of defenders and things like that."

Strongholds will also bestow resting bonuses dependent on what facilities you have there. Training Grounds will bolster the Strength stat, for instance, whereas a Library will bolster Lore. You'll also be able to grow ingredients in gardens there, get special offers from travelling sales people and... get filthy rich. Your Stronghold comes with all the surrounding lands, which are taxed. And you're the taxer.

There's a small chance you'll be able take your customised Stronghold into other Pillars of Eternity games (and there's a good chance there'll be more of those). But Sawyer seemed to like the idea of a new game being set in a new area.

Nevertheless, "If we made another Eternity, whether or not it's that Stronghold, we would still have a Stronghold that works in the same general way."
Excellent.
 

maverick

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Did they somehow promise romances during the Kickstarter pitch? If they did, there will be some *serious* butthurt at Obsidian's forum...
 

Septaryeth

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Did they somehow promise romances during the Kickstarter pitch? If they did, there will be some *serious* butthurt at Obsidian's forum...

I thought the whole point of going to Kickstarter is to make their own game without some people shoving in things like forced romance.
 

AN4RCHID

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:nocountryforshitposters:
 
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No romances is good knews! Now, hopefully, some of the characters are hard cunts who've had hard lives and want nothing more than to adventure and also splatter and dismember their foes.
 
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No romances? Another commercial flop.

And if you play on Expert mode, or if you enable character death, then followers can die. But Obsidian's "not real big on having characters die in scripted sequences". (Incidentally, if you don't like the given, storied crop of party members, you can make your own, using the Adventurer's Hall.)

:thumbsup:
 

tuluse

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I thought the whole point of going to Kickstarter is to make their own game without some people shoving in things like forced romance.
There are a lot of reasons to go to kickstarter. Obsidian does not see it as the belief that they can make "Fuck you: suck my dick—Josh Sawyer's Personal Dream RPG Experience".
 

Volourn

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"I'm out to save the world, not fuck the dumb bimbos who come with me."

Why not both? Plus, 'save the world'? That's even more cliché.

I love that that there is actual character death but death in 'scripted sequences' should be possible.

Stronghold sounds fun but it isn't original.
 

DemonKing

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Glad to see romances are gone...you can always try and bonk annoying people in real life so I've always felt there's no need for it in a game where the focus should be on doing all those non-mundane things like casting magic spells, killing monsters and taking their phat loot.
 

dukeofwhales

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My issue with romances (other than the frequent terrible writing) is that I just can't buy that companions would fall in love with the PC after what is usually about 5 branching dialogues. Sure, suspension of disbelief, they probably talk when charging around the map doing fetch quests, etc, but it always just seems so weird that I choose a couple of 'nice' dialogue options and suddenly bitches are all over me. So in that sense I guess JES is right - you need heaps of dialogue to make it seem real (or maybe it's impossible, who knows).
 
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Regarding the comment about having NPCs dying in scripted scenes. I know KoTOR2 gets a lot of flack for the parts where you're forced to play as particular party members - and when it comes to the Nar Shadar (is that it? a midgame planet anyway) I can understand why. But I actually really liked the idea of how they did the endgame fights in the restored content version. Partially because it wasn't an extended sequence - just one fight or so each - but also because it wasn't a case of having to win to progress, it just determined which characters survived the ending.

Not to mention, whilst it felt to have to play non-preferred characters earlier in the game, it did feel kind of awesome to have things like Atton getting to duel Darth Sion in the end game, especially because you had to have trained him into a jedi for Atton to stand a chance. I also really liked the character deaths at the end of PS:T as well - though both PS:T and KoTOR2 had specific thematic reasons for NPC deaths to be significant - but the KoTOR2 endgame (in concept, not implementation obviously) seemed like a good compromise between being able to use 'doomed characters' or 'heroic sacrifices' for dramatic effect, without having to force a death-by-cutscene.

Regarding romances, I've said this a gazillion times - (a) they have to come organically from the story and characters, not shoehorned in as a gaming 'feature', and (b) they can't be there as waifus - they need to match the game's atmosphere and themes. I don't mind Shephard shagging everything that moves because he's basically James Bond in space (in fact, they should have played that up even further - make him/her like Geralt in the Witcher, but without the juvenile sex cards). But conversely, the only reason Annah worked in PS:T was because the game went out of its way to tell you 'this is a really bad idea' (i.e. that you're bringing torment upon all your companions, and this is the worst possible thing that could happen to her).

What that means is that it's become impossible to incorporate romances into a game narrative, because you need to shoehorn options not only for every single sexual alignment, but also every single 'taste' (Hepler's infamous 'we've got the slutty one and the virginial one, so we've covered all the bases'). And then you have to turn them into waifus instead of interesting stories that fit the narrative - you can't make the romances tragic, or abusive or unhealthy. You could never do Romeo and Juliet in a game, let alone Hamlet and Ophelia. Nor could you do the Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix story from My Own Private Idaho. I fully support the idea of having greater diversity in gaming, but making romances a 'choose your waifu' prevents great gay stories like My Own Private Idaho as much as it does a Hamlet and Ophelia story.

Given a choice between shoehorning something in that goes against the grain of the narrative, and which ends up being embarassingly badly written (because by making it a 'feature' instead of something which rises organically, you end up with the '5 branching dialogues romance' problem), and just leaving it out and writing a different kind of story, I think we're better off just leaving it out.
 

Surf Solar

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dukeofwhales , people Fall in love/fuck each other after only brief dialogues as well
 

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