Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[Infinitron]

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

3 years (Pentiment): 9 months in pre-production and ~27 months in development.

What in the actual fuck?

 

[Infinitron]

3 years (Pentiment): 9 months in pre-production and ~27 months in development.

What in the actual fuck?

Very small development team working from home during the pandemic?

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

Very small development team working from home during the pandemic?

The pandemic didn't last that much, and even if they play the "smarr company prease understand" card, it's still what amounts to a very short indie game. The only way this makes sense is if the game got scrapped and redone several times over during development, which wouldn't surprise me, but it still amazes me how much more inefficient developers are getting at making games.

 

[Butter]

Sawyer probably leveraged the small team size to negotiate for more time.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

That was probably something they did on their spare time, so to speak.

 

[Hace El Oso]

That was probably something they did on their spare time, so to speak.

I don't believe that for a second. They were paid their salaries just like they always are. They aren't working at some small independent company living on subsistence wages until release and only then paid commensurately with the success of the title.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Listen it takes a long time browsing through different medieval fonts.

 

[ferratilis]

They did it in their spare time of sitting on their asses all day and doing nothing, as is usual for Microsoft-owned studios. Why work hard and take risks when you can do nothing and still get paid?

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

That was probably something they did on their spare time, so to speak.

I don't believe that for a second. They were paid their salaries just like they always are. They aren't working at some small independent company living on subsistence wages until release and only then paid commensurately with the success of the title.

What I meant is that Josh probably used some dead time to gather some Obsidian employees to work in his game while others were being developed.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Roguey]

Black Hound needing more than 3 years and Aliens not even being close to finished after 2.5 (despite Feargus's claims to the contrary) was certainly bad.

 

[luj1]

Josh lost all credibility as game designer, seems fully devoted to whoring on twitter for some peanuts of attention (from his 7 fans)

 

[TC Jr]

Josh lost all credibility as game designer, seems fully devoted to whoring on twitter for some peanuts of attention (from his 7 fans)

He's a complete fag on twitter but I still like his games, weird one

 

[Infinitron]

 

[ropetight]

This man needs to be forbidden from getting near to RPG's like Mitnick was forbidden to go near a computer.
Nothing good can come out of it.

 

[Alienman]

Why not just keep quick save as it is, and let the player make the decision.

 

[Artyoan]

I don't disagree with what he's saying there. Not a fan of threshold checks though. I've said before that manual saving is the root of the problem. A crpg can have a dark souls style death system to accommodate automatic saving and push back on the player desire to make the perfect playthrough from save scumming.

It would just require not having a buggy game and being very clear about what dialogue/choice actually entails, even if the full consequences are unknown, so as to not frustrate the player too much.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Who the hell reloads a save to pick different choices, is that how your grandpa would play an RPG you fucking zoomers? No he would ride it out his choices while buttfucking grandma in the ass.

 

[Roguey]

Why not just keep quick save as it is, and let the player make the decision.

First post in the thread https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1691924424990273693 "if designers do not like save scumming (not a given), they should design their mechanics to not incentivize save scumming."

 

[Infinitron]

 

[0sacred]

Eliminate all bad choices. Dump your most important ability scores. Equip sticks for weapons. Let your squishies tank.

 

[Alienman]

I would rather the enemies miss me than grazed since getting HP back can be a pain in DnD. Death by thousand grazes.

 

[Orion]

Why not just keep quick save as it is, and let the player make the decision.

Because players make decisions that go against their best interest and need to be protected from themselves

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Josh namedrops Souls but he forgets that those games are infamous for not communicating things to the player. That came as a necessary change in Elden Ring, but even then, the feedback you're given is partial, and players know that, because they know the game itself is unreliable in this regard. You don't care about failing in Souls games because you might not even know you're failing. In traditional D&D games, PoE and New Vegas you're given an entire database of information about the percentages, dice rolls, effects and the like. You know you're going to fail. You know failing a quest is a mini game over. Some game designer infamously said that a game over screen is a failure of game design, and it was criticized because it was said in a context of gameplay being dumbing down, but in a way I feel this applies to the Souls philosophy. The only real game over is when the player dies. Failing a quest or not means that you'll miss out on something or other, yes, but that's only one more tool in a world of other tools you have at your disposal. And this approach also invites experimentation, unlike New Vegas, where you want to get those 100 speech points because fighting Lanius is a PITA in this gamebryo thing.